Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

This story, like many other stories and legends, starts on the fateful day Steve Rogers sunk in the ocean, taking the Tesseract with him.

As the world we knew ended in a blaze of blue and the war came to a close, the Blue Cube —not liking the idea of being kept captive in the ice at all— spread its energy far and wide in search of an escape. It didn't find one, but burned through thousands of suns and worlds all the same, each one different from the next.

As the ice enveloped the good captain and the Gem of Space forever, a world far away and yet so close died with a scream of anguish, and so did the souls that inhabited it.

It was then that the Tesseract knew that something had gone extremely wrong with its grand plan. The universe it had reached wasn't capable of holding its power. However, the cube had enough power to allow a single, golden wisp to slip past the powerful barrier of space and time (and oh, would the Tesseract’s green brother  be pissed at that!) and to plant itself solidly in the ice. Again, so close, and yet so far.

This story wouldn't have been much of a story, though, if Howard Stark hadn't kept poking at the ice for another solid forty years. If he hadn’t prodded and blown up the giant ice packs that littered the Arctic, the wisp would have never found its way out. As it was, Stark Industries destroyed just the right iceberg floating carelessly in the sea. And so the last, breathing life of a forgotten world broke free.

As the wisp exploded into a golden dust of promises and magic, Darcy Lewis’ soul got its spark.

And so begins our story.

Henry Lewis was not what people would call a cool man .

He did his job well at the firm he worked for, he loved his wife very much, he had a very precise and strict routine he adhered to religiously, and generally found it difficult to make changes on the fly.

Because he loved his wife dearly, and she was an extremely spontaneous woman, Henry soon learned his carefully laid plans usually lasted no longer than approximately twenty minutes. He grumbled and sulked, but in the end he adapted as graciously as he could.

So on that day when he came home from work and found his partner sitting on the sofa, a tiny stick in her hands and a wide-eyed look plastered on her face, he knew that any 'carefully laid plan' he was going to make would need to account for another mouth.

Darcy Lewis came into the world at the end of the summer, and from the moment the nurse put the pink bundle in his hands, Henry knew he was done for.

She wasn't a difficult child. She loved and smiled freely, made grabby gestures at everything that came her way (especially his goatee), wasn't a fussy eater, and best of all slept through the night like an angel. All in all, she was the ideal child and a parent's dream.

A few weeks in, though, little Darcy started exhibiting some of the most peculiar behaviour Henry had ever seen from a kid. Not even his brother's twins, who were agitated, neurotic, and probably somehow demented, had been like this when they were toddlers.

Darcy would spend hours alone in her room, poking and glaring at her very important and very precious collection of rocks and pinecones (' they're shiny, Dad, shiny!' ). She could stare out of the window for hours with singular focus, making grabby hands at birds or squirrels that poked through the window curiously (and hadn't that made Lorna scream the first time).

What really worried him, though, was the fact that she was scared—terrified, even—of the color green.

The first time she'd seen a traffic light she'd screamed, so high-pitched that people in the streets stared at him so hard he'd felt ashamed. She wouldn’t calm down for hours and when later asked, she couldn't say why she'd been so scared.

Darcy’s irrational fear of green lights prompted Henry to approach the idea that they go to a doctor. His wife hemmed and hawed for a while, unwilling to let scientists look at her daughter, who was perfectly normal thank you very much. In the end, he won the argument. The Lewises decided to approach a specialist, and then two, but nothing indicated that Darcy was anything but a well-balanced child.

"It's just a phobia, like being afraid of the dark," the latest Doctor assured them for the fourth time in an hour. "She'll grow out of it, like most kids do."

As the months passed, Darcy stopped screaming and crying at every flash of green she saw.

But Henry knew she was just humoring them. He saw that his little girl was still terrified, but pretended not to be, because the fear wasn't ‘rational,’ and he wondered how much she could understand of rationality at the tender age of five. Probably not much, but enough to lie through her teeth and say that the mean light wasn't scary anymore.

He wished she'd confide in him a bit more, but didn't push her and allowed her to believe she was fooling them all. And maybe he ignored the animals poking around the windows more than he should legitimately have, but his wife wasn't complaining and his daughter was a fundamentally happy child.

Their life was almost perfect.

For her part, Darcy Lewis knew she was not quite normal.

It wasn't in her father's looks, even if those were almost the worst, or even in the outright painful words his cousins would send her way. It was in the certainty that what she was doing was not rational.

She'd asked her Dad the meaning of that word a few years back, when the second psychologist had seen her and asked her for the umpteenth time, 'Why is the green light so scary?' (She didn't know, okay? She just knew it made her skin crawl. She didn't know why, or how, it just did. She probably should have answered with the grown-up answer her grandma always gave her, 'Because Jesus said so. ' She didn't know if Jesus had actually said so, but she was scared either way.)

Rational meant that it could be explained with science .

But Darcy made a lot of things happen that couldn't be explained (or science-d; she'd tried with her little chemistry experiments).

The first time it happened, Darcy was three and didn't think much of it. She was trying to reach a shiny rock that was just a smidge too far out of her reach. The rock floated gently into her hands, and she happily made her way to her father, who had taken her to the park.

The second and third time, Darcy was five and realized that maybe maybe it wasn't supposed to happen. The terrible twins (her dad's words, not hers!) had destroyed her latest crayon drawing, and a beautiful one at that, and were proceeding to destroy the next one. Suddenly, the ball they loved to play with emitted a sharp hissing sound and deflated so fast . While they were distracted, the bird drawing they hadn't managed to destroy yet winke d at her and flew away.

Mindful of what happened the last time she said something strange, Darcy didn’t tell anyone about the winking drawing.

Darcy was a good kid who always took to heart whatever her parents told her. So, when she found out she was probably the one who made the strange things happen (because she had not erased her drawing!), she knew it was time to test it like a true scientist would.

The first few tries were...unsuccessful, that's the word.

There was no way to make her drawing come to life again. She tried and tried and looked at it until she was blue in the face, but nothing came of it. And then, when she grew very frustrated on her fourth day of losing her battle of wills with the pencil sketch, the tiny seagull she'd drawn kree'd at her and beat its tiny wings.

She watched in wonder as the tiny creature flapped inconsistently for an entire minute before landing on tiny scrawny legs that couldn't possibly hold its weight. The bird made itself comfortable on the scrap of paper and called back at her again.

" Hi! " She breathed in wonder, lifting her index finger to touch it.

The seagull moved its head to lean into the touch, but it was nothing but a very soft pencil drawing, and the lines smudged a bit. Darcy retreated her hand immediately, but it was too late. The bird stopped moving and chirping. It was a lifeless drawing once again.

She tried prodding at it again, but the new friend she'd made was alive no longer. She cried a bit, her lips forming a tiny scowl. As she cried, the flowers on the kitchen table wilted right in front of her eyes. Surprised and scared at the new development, Darcy quickly checked that Mom wasn't watching (Lorna was in her 'creative phase' as she called it, and spent lots and lots of time sewing weird stuff that smelled good) and scurried away.

The new discovery opened up a world of new possibilities for Darcy. While the ability of killing flowers wasn't very cool, it showed the little girl that there was a chance that the ball deflating and the rock floating could have been caused by the same weird magic that gave birth to her little pencil bird.

And so started a long series of 'speriments that culminated with a pencil that drew on its own on Darcy's eighth birthday.

It was a complete and glorious success.

Moving objects with her mind was a stupid easy thing to do, it turned out. Darcy couldn't make the pencil do her homework (she'd tried, but pencils were very stupid and only served to make squiggles on the paper), but she could move it as she wanted as long as she could see it.

It was brilliant.

She was very, very careful not to do it whenever her parents were around, or her friends from school, or anyone else. But then again, she didn't need to use it that much anyway, since it wasn't all that useful for a kid.

She hadn't tried another bird yet, but did change rocks into pinecones and pinecones into rocks a lot of times. Her father hadn't even noticed when she switched the stuff around!

And one time, one time a paper crane she'd made out of origami had flapped around her room for an entire hour before it went back to being lifeless.

She was certain the next time she animated one of her drawings she could coax it off the paper.

And she did.

The sparrow was tiny and paper thin—the color was not right and almost transparent in its fragility—but it was real and alive and she could touch it, and it tweeted and ate what she gave it to eat and it was awesome.

It was, however, too frail. The wings were too flat and the legs too big to be mistaken for a sparrow, even from afar. It didn't last two days before fading away with a sad chirp.

Darcy was inconsolable after losing her first creation. She didn't eat for the whole day, to the point that even her mother raised her eyebrows at her unusual behaviour. But Darcy was mourning, and didn't care much about reassuring her absentee mother.

A few nights later, she concluded that she wouldn't try bringing another bird to life before knowing exactly what had gone wrong with her tiny fluffy ball.

The answer came to her a few weeks later.

They were doing science at school, and Bobby Carlson was again making a show of raising his hand at every single thing the teacher was saying (if he wanted to protest or answer, no one knew, because the teacher almost never let him speak after the first 20 questions so he had to make them count).

They were talking about animals and the lesson should have been interesting but it actually wasn't. Until Bobby asked very loudly (' the hand, Bobby, the hand!' ) why the teacher didn't give him the A he deserved. At that, Mrs Heller sighed very loudly and proceeded to tell him that while his drawing was indeed very pretty, the point was to make a scientifically accurate drawing, not a fantasy one. A cat with a lizard head and gills, while very original, would at no point be able to live on the ground. As it was, no animal could survive in their proper environment without all the parts they'd been made with.

That’s… it. She realized, awestruck. That’s just it!

The answer she'd been asking herself for so long, finally at the tip of her fingers.

Of course her Mr Sparrow couldn't fly with those tiny wings, of course he couldn't live long without the resources he needed!

The failing that had stopped her from trying again now made perfect sense and was ready to be conquered.

Darcy made use of her shiny new library card ( 'because you see, Darcy, a young girl should always know that reading is wonderful' ) and got as many books as she could on birds.

For years, she studied meticulously how birds worked. Some parts were gross, like, so gross ( did you know birds fed their chicks with vomit? yuck. ), but most of it was fascinating.

And then she proceeded to draw them. She drew dozens, hundreds and then thousands of different birds, from skeletons and wings to sparrow and then to bald eagle, and when her hands grew tired her mind would do the rest and lift the pencil to draw some more. And her birds became more and more realistic and accurate and precise and real .

Until one day, when she was eleven, Darcy’s third bird-speriment , Miss Pink, had been alive for five months and became her very best friend in the world.

She was exactly how Darcy wanted her. Tiny, beautiful, very smart for a bird, and most of all, alive .

Chapter Text

Eleven years old was a weird age for Darcy.

First, her cousins moved all the way to Texas, so far away she needed a bus and a train to reach them. The lack of imposed weekly visits made Darcy's days so much better.

Second, her body started developing earlier than her peers, which meant a very weird conversation with her mother. That had been... a mess. There was no salvaging the terrible conversation--and Lorna had even tried to finish it off with her usual vague 'que sera sera'. And so Darcy promptly discarded whatever mom told her about honey and bees and decided going to her father was a smarter idea . Dad had swallowed his pride and embarrassment like a champion and explained it all to the best of his abilities. It was a conversation neither of them wanted to repeat any time soon, if at all.

And last, but not least, her family accepted that Darcy's bird was there to stay. They probably didn't believe one bit that Miss Pink had been found mysteriously outside their porch door, but since no one had actually claimed the bird and Darcy and the little lovebird formed a tentative bond immediately, they had allowed the tiny creature to stay. Miss Pink now had a proper little cage and was an official member of the Lewis family. If the food lasted much longer than it should and Miss Pink's cage was always spotlessly clean, no one thought a thing about it, apart from what a good pet owner young Darcy was.

The three events in quick succession made Darcy Lewis an extremely popular girl at school. She was no longer the weird cousin everyone avoided--instead, she was an actual grown up with grownup things and she even had a cool pet bird that was sweet and fluffy. She was everyone's friend and loved every minute of it.

Her new feathery friend also gave her insight into the future. Whereas before her answer had always been 'I want to be a prince like my Daddy', now every time an adult asked her “what do you want to be when you grow up?” her answer was 'I want to be a scientist' or '...a vet' or, one memorable time, 'I want to create the largest bird reserve ever!'.

The fascination their daughter had with birds, wings, and anything resembling a feather (not to mention floating stuff like papers or, God forbid, air balloons) was hardly news for Henry and Lorna Lewis, who had by now learnt that their daughter was anything but flaky in her goals and obsessions. Darcy could be very single-minded in her endeavors, to the point of forgetting what was going on around her. That behavior was normal for a tiny kid, but the lack of attention could spell trouble as she got older, her psychologist said.

While Lorna had never made mystery of how unconcerned she was with her daughter--to the point that Darcy thought the woman was downright batty in addition to supremely uncaring--Henry worried over his daughter's strangeness. He'd tried to teach his daughter to always be prepared to back whatever she did with facts, solid proof, and rationality, but every day he felt he had failed a bit more.

At first it was the green lights. Darcy was now eleven, going on twelve, and yet sometimes she still flinched at the sudden green flashes of the Arcade, only to look fleetingly at him and then hastily turn away, in case he was returning the stare.

Then there were the hours she spent in her room drawing obsessively, bird after bird after bird. Some were cute, exceedingly so, but some were unnerving. The huge buzzard she'd drawn on the wall, for example, was so realistic he could have sworn he once saw it move. How on Earth Darcy had reached that high on the wall to paint it was another mystery in and of itself. He thought Lorna had helped her, but the woman had been as nonplussed as he was.

And now, the bird. The lovebird was adorable, he didn't deny that. She was well-mannered for a wild thing (if she really had been a wild thing, because she seemed extremely domesticated), didn't eat much and never left droppings around. She was as perfect a bird as Darcy had been a toddler. And this was simply ridiculous to believe. His daughter loved the pet, and talked to her for hours. The real problem, which could not be ignored? The bird talked back. It was scratchy and slow, but Pink always answered her master to such a degree Henry started to believe the parrot-y creature was sentient. And for this, he worried more. Abnormality was noticed extremely quickly in small towns, and while Darcy could have been classed as 'quirky' before, there was no denying that this--this was strange .

But Darcy was such a happy kid. He watched as she ran with her friends at the park, playing and laughing so wildly. He drank in her face, alight with a brilliant smile as her friends chased her under the slide.

Maybe he was wrong, after all. Yeah, it had to be it. A mistake.

Christmas came and went and so did the rest of the holiday season.

Darcy didn't like spending the holidays with her extended family. The Lewises were a lot--they were loud and made no secret of how much they didn't like her. Well, except for Grandma.

Grandma Lewis had taken a good look at Darcy when she was a toddler, Dad said, and promptly declared her to be, “a real Lewis, this one!” much to the scorn of Uncle Michael. So, to Darcy, Grandma was the absolute coolest, and best of all she liked Pink.

Darcy had seen her Aunt look at her best friend in distaste once or twice, and her own father had this pinched look every time he thought of the bird (she had started calling it his pinched look #19 ™ ) , but not Grandma.

Nope, Grandma Lewis just complained that now she'd have to remake all of her Christmas hat from scratch. And what a cool hat it was! Red and woolen and soft and it even had a little pocket for Pink. It was the absolute best and so was Grandma.

Darcy was totally going to miss her, but she was secretly glad to be away from the imposing form of Uncle Michael and his terrible twins.

When she got back to school on that snowy Monday, though, she didn't expect Melissa’s empty seat to greet her.

Melissa Porter was one of her friends, one who had stuck by her even before she was everyone's friend. But she wasn't there anymore.

At first, Darcy and her friends thought she was sick. The flu and colds were common during winter, and this had been a very cold one (there was so much white!), but after three weeks there was no trace of the tiny girl with blond pigtails. The teachers had even stopped calling her name during attendance.

So, with much begging and pouting, Darcy convinced her father to take her to Melissa's house to see if there was anything they could do. She even got all the correct homework from the teachers (they'd looked at her a bit funny, but what did they know of friendship anyway).

They walked across the cobbled streets of the Porter's and rang the bell.

There was no response.

They waited a few minutes, and tried again.

Again, there was nothing but silence.

“Ye Lookin' for ta Portah's?” a gruff voice asked from behind them.

Darcy jumped and even her Dad startled. He turned around to face the man with a very polite mask of curiosity. His grip on her hand tightened.

“Yes.” Her father replied, politely.

“They'n here.” The man furrowed his thick brows. “What'cha need wit'em?”

“I'm bringing Mel her homework.” Darcy chirped helpfully. Her father shot her a warning look and she quieted.

“Ah.” The man's look softened, but then he stared pointedly at her dad. “The' mov'd a coupla weeks ago.”

“Why?”

The man shot Darcy another look, and then meaningfully pointed to a corner of the street. Her father nodded slightly, crouched so she got to her eye level and said “Why don't you wait a bit by the door, darling? I'll be right there.”

Darcy didn't know why she couldn't hear what they were going to say, but obediently nodded and got a bit further away.

The man started speaking fast and softly to her dad's, his lips so close to his ears Darcy could hardly make anything out. But her dad's eyes were widening and his face was becoming paler by the second. At the end, his face was chalk white and he was visibly sweating.

“I see, I see. Thank you.” He was nodding absently. “Darcy, let's go.”

“What?” Darcy was speechless. Were they going to give up? Where was Mel?

“We're going home. They're not coming back, peanut.”

It didn't make a lick of sense. Mel would have told her they were moving. Friends didn't just poof into thin air, did they? Had something happened to Mel? Was she really really sick?

“No, no of course not.” Her father said hastily. “They just had to move far far away and very suddenly so she couldn't tell you in advance. I'm sure she's fine.” But his eyes told a different story. Mel was not fine, Darcy could see it. And Darcy really wanted to tell him she was eleven, she was grown up and could understand.

But her father was really really scared, and the man behind them was really really sad, and so Darcy didn't press. They went back home in silence, and the only thing Darcy remembered of that walk back, was that her Dad didn't take her hand in his.

Mel didn't come back ever, and her father refused to tell her what was wrong.

And so life went on, and her friend started to become nothing more than a memory. She would have completely forgotten all about the blonde girl with pigtails, if she hadn't heard the teachers talking about her a few weeks later.

“...so shocked, I'm telling you, so shocked.”

“Yes, yes, I mean, if there was a quirky kid in your class, Mary, I thought it'd have to be the Lewis girl.”

“Who? Darcy? No, she's adorable, a real gem. She's so cute!”

“Yes, but so was the Porter girl, wasn't she? And here we are, a mutant , in our scho- Darcy!” the teacher breathed in sharply when she noticed her. All the other teachers stiffened.

“What are you doing here, honey?” Mrs Heller was back to smiling that fake smile of hers. The other teachers dispersed quickly, their smiles as fake and strained as Mrs Heller's.

“I was just...” she fumbled. “I was looking for my crayons, Mrs Heller.” she lied. But the teacher didn't notice, and so laughed nervously and allowed her to get her colored pencils.

Darcy didn't know why the teachers all had jumped away like they were burned, but she was determined to find out.

“Dad, what's a mutant?”

The choking noises her dad made into his coffee mug were not as satisfying as she thought they would be. Even Lorna had emerged from her torpor and was now looking strangely at her.

“Why do you ask, peanut?” He said, wiping carefully his suit with a napkin.

“The teachers at school said that Mel was one,” she answered, curious.

Lorna snorted. “Go figure.” She then rose from the table, probably ready to get back to her paint splatters that she called 'couture' (Darcy was certain 'couture' wasn't the right French word, anyway).

Her dad sighed heavily.

“You see, Darcy, some people, sometimes, aren't really... normal, for lack of a better term. They can be different from normal. Some have orange skin, or weird antennae, some look exactly like a normal human looks like, but make strange things happen. Those people, they don't belong with us, do they?”

Oh. People who did strange things were mutants, and didn't belong?

“Are they... bad?” she asked in a small voice.

“Well...” her father hesitated. “I'm sure not all of them are bad. But many of them, yes. They can't control themselves very well, and make bad things happen. It's why the Porters moved.”

“Why?”

“So that they could get your friend Melissa the help she needed. I'm sure the government found her a great accommodation.”

“They... they sent her away?”

“That's... that's what happens, peanut. Normal people aren't equipped to deal with mutants, are they? They need laboratories and doctors and science to make them understand... It's what's best for them, really.”

Darcy was horrified. If by her reasoning, she was a mutant, because she was weird and made things happen that were magic and Miss Pink was magic too, she would be separated from her Dad . She'd be sent to a dark lab like in the comic books the horrible twins used to torture her with and everyone would forget about her.

Oh God, she was forgetting Mel! She was just like the normal people who pretended mutants weren’t there!

She pushed her breakfast away, claiming that she wasn't hungry anymore.  Her dad had his pinched look #19 on, and Darcy realized for the first time that her lies and her tries to pass for the normal kid her father wanted so bad hadn't fooled him at all.

Suddenly lost, she went to her bedroom in silence.

She spent the day thinking of mutants and Mel and lab facilities where people were experimented on and screamed and prayed. None of the images were comforting to her. She felt scared, and so very alone.

“Are you okay?” The soft voice of her friend Pink broke her out of her musings.

“No, Pink, I'm really not” her lips wobbled a bit.

“What's wrong?”

“I... I think I could be a mutant?”

“...Is it a bad thing?” The bird sounded confused.

“I don't know? Dad says mutants are bad.”

“Oh.” The bird was suddenly pensive, and it was such a comical look on a lovebird. “Are we going to be bad and evil?”

“No!” Darcy exclaimed. “I don't want to be evil!”

“Well, then it's okay.” Miss Pink concluded, decisively. “If we don't want to be evil, then we're not.”

Was it that easy? Well, Darcy concluded, it was. If she didn't do bad things and if she behaved really well and if no one saw her do weird things, she wouldn't be revealed a mutant and she would not be forced to be evil. Also, her dad said that mutants were dangerous because uncontrollable, but her powers were very easy and controlled. Maybe she just had to train them a bit more...

“You're right, Pink. We're going to be the best mutants in the world.”

“Yay!” the bird cheered enthusiastically.

Reassured, Darcy returned to be cheerful again. She was however, extra careful about her stuff. She stopped drawing in public and talking to Pink so much. Her dreams changed from 'scientist' to 'teacher' and 'I want to be a good mom'.

But in the darkness of her room, she painted more and more birds and she willed them alive. They didn't leave the pages of her journals or her walls, but they could talk and were what kept her from feeling so alone.

And one day, right beside her bed, she painted a beautiful cardinal. The cardinal moved and chirped happily.

“Hi,” Darcy smiled. “Your name's Melissa, and I'll never forget you.”

Chapter Text

“Darcy... I-I need you to take the car and get to the hospital . It's.. It's an emergency. There's been an accident... Your father...”

This wasn't happening. It had to be a dream; the strange ones you get when you eat too much.

Darcy vaguely remembered getting to the hospital that night, soaked to the bone as the rain poured down from the sky all over town. It hadn't rained for weeks, she contemplated distantly, as she was escorted to her father's hospital room. Dad hated rain--it messed the traffic patterns.

Lorna was there.

Her dark hair had been pulled back in such a careless manner she made a perfect impression of a scarecrow, but she was pale and crying and Darcy chastised herself for thinking that on such a terrible occasion.

She was surprised her mom had called, but then again, she wasn't a monster and if there was one thing she and Lorna saw eye to eye about, it was Darcy’s father. Lorna loved Henry in a way she'd never loved her daughter.

Her mother (and it pained Darcy to call her that, but egg donor was disrespectful) looked up from where she was sitting, her hands on her face. “You made it.” She whispered. She sounded incredulous.

“How bad is it?”

“It's...” Lorna swallowed. “It's bad. Someone T-boned him at the intersection between Main Street and Glacson's. Hydroplaned straight into him.”

“Wha- No! Dad's always careful with that!” It was impossible. She couldn't believe it.

“Well, the other driver wasn't,” Lorna snapped. “Not that anyone cares now, he's dead .”

Darcy swallowed and took a step back. Okay, this wasn't helping anyone. “And Dad? How bad is it, exactly?”

“Bad.” The woman breathed through her nose. “He... he comes and goes, but he asked to see you.” At that, she gestured widely to the room.

“Is he...?”

“Dying?” Lorna snorted acerbically. “Yes. The doctors said that the surgery has a very low chance of success and he had lost a lot of blood already. I thought you wanted to see him before he went under.”

Her body felt like lead. She took another step back.

“Well?” Her mother interrupted her musings, “Aren't you going to see him off? Go!”

Seeing him off. This was surreal.

The room was pasty white. It should have looked sanitary, but it was just dreary.

She sat down on the uncomfortable chair beside her father's bed.

He was asleep, or maybe he just had his eyes closed. His face was bandaged and yet so pale there was almost no contrast between his pallor and the white fabric. God, was this how she'd remember him forever?

She swallowed a fresh bout of tears. This wasn't real, this was just a horrible nightmare.

“...Dad?”

He didn't turn towards her, but his left eye opened and looked right at her. “Hey, peanut.” He tried to sit up, but choked, and immediately started coughing weakly. “You made it.”

“Yes, yes of course I made it.” She frantically tried to put him back to rest. “Lie back. You're going to get worse.”

“There isn’t much worse to get, Darcy, trust me.” He smiled weakly, or grimaced painfully.

“Don't... don't say that, Dad. It's going to be fine.”

“Yes.” He looked right at her. “It's... it's going to be fine, honey. Everything's going to be just fine. But Darcy. I need to tell you something. Before... yeah, before.” He took a moment of silence, presumably to collect his thoughts. “Lorna...” and really? Were they going to speak about her now? “...Lorna and I, we didn't want kids, Darce.”

The thought had crossed her mind, once or twice or everyday since she was told about prevention and contraception, really.

“But. But we accepted that you were coming and … yeah it wasn't fair not to give you a chance without trying. And,” Oh God, was she crying? “Maybe we've been terrible parents, I like to think we didn't fail too badly with you.”

“Of, of course not.” She scrambled to formulate an answer that didn't say 'Lorna sucks' too much. “You've been the best parent, the best.” And yes, yes she was crying. And she wasn't a pretty crier either.

“No, not really.” He tried that painful smile again and coughed harder. “You see. It was clear from moment one that you, you weren't a normal kid. You were too perfect.”

Wha-?

“We'd take you to the park and listen to all the other parents complain about the sleepless nights and the food wars they had with their kids and the colic and the nappies and we'd just stare nonplussed, because you did nothing- nothing of the sort and... and we'd just wonder. And then you grew up and...”

“...The green lights?” Darcy supplied.

“Yes, that... that too. But I- I think it was the birds that clued us in...”

“The.. the birds?” She'd started drawing birds much, much later than her endless line of appointments to specialists and psychologists.

“Ah...” He closed his eyes a bit and breathed in deeply. He twitched in pain. “You probably don't remember it. When you were tiny, very very tiny, you'd stare at the window for... for hours and hours. And birds and little animals would poke their faces through the window to look back at you. It drove your mother crazy. We never knew when we'd see the last of them.” He wasn't looking at her, he was looking at the door and whispering so quietly she had a hard time understanding every word.

“One day, there was this big squirrel that kept bringing you nuts. I think we had to physically remove him and then we had to take a shot at the hospital.” He reminisced very softly. And Darcy couldn't understand why he'd speak so quietly, until she noticed a policeman standing on the opposite side of the corridor she'd come from. How could she have missed him?!

“And so we...” he was wheezing at this point. “We knew you weren't... really normal. But we'd hoped-- I'd hoped --that somehow we had it wrong. And, and I tried to teach you what I knew about facts and rationality and science; they're values that have served me well in my life, and... I hoped they'd serve you too. And... every time I saw you draw one of your birds or talk to your pet, I knew inside that it was hardly as innocuous as you pretended it to be... no, don't deny it.” He really looked at her now. “I know I must have scared you... terrified you, a lot when you were younger, but I stand by what I said then; people who are dangerous and don't behave normally don't belong with the normal people. And this lesson, this lesson has served you well for a very... very” He coughed wildly, and Darcy could see the sclera in his eyes. “Very well. It kept you cautious, and hidden, for a very long time. And this, this is not the time to let go peanut, because, I don't know what you do or how, but... there are people” He looked around surreptitiously. “People who will not hesitate to use you for their agenda. And... You must be careful, peanut, very careful. They must not find you.” He was starting to sound really agitated by then.

She thought of Mel, and the fact that she'd never seen her again and had no idea where she was. She understood, really, but this was not the time to really think about that. “No, no of course not, I'll... I'll be careful, but please lay down, stay calm.” She said desperately, but she was afraid to physically restrain him for fear of hurting him.

“Yes, you must be. And take care of your mother... please?” He was talking to softly now, she hardly could make out the words. “She... she's not the kindest person around, but she... she loves you, deep down...” He coughed, weakly this time.

“Dad? Dad?”

“Eh.. I love you, peanut. Don't, don't think.. for a second, that I regretted knowing you, eh?” His eyes rolled back.

“Dad!”

She idly wondered how she'd gotten to the corridor leading to the OR.

Lorna was pacing left and right.

The policeman had politely asked a few questions, asked the doctors something, and then excused himself with a sympathetic look that was absolutely rehearsed. Darcy didn't care one bit.

Everything disappeared the moment the surgeon exited the room. He spared one look at the two women, shook his head and marched towards them.

“ We did everything we could… ”

Darcy stared at the OR behind the medic uncomprehendingly, and stayed like this for a full ten minutes, before Lorna's wails of desperation shook her.

This was real.

Dad was gone.

It was curious, Darcy mused, how relatives you didn't know existed bloomed from the sidewalk at the prospect of free food. This usually occurred for weddings, funerals and, in case of important people, social gatherings (she supposed Bar Mitzvahs weren't that different, but had no way to compare them).

The Lewis family was a big one--Darcy had been vaguely aware of this fact. What she absolutely didn't expect was how big of a 'clan' it was. Hundreds of people she didn't know had gathered to say goodbye to Henry, and possibly to eat the food. Watching some of the fourth and fifth cousins thrice removed, she felt safe in the assumption that it really was for the food.

She'd shaken the hands of she didn't know how many people and she was really starting to cramp up.

She looked at her mother and noticed she wasn't faring much better.

Darcy had no idea how Lorna had been able to get the wheels moving so quickly to gather their entire family in two days. She suspected Grandma Lewis had had a hand in this, but she didn't really want to ask either of them.

“Are you ready, Darcy?” Her grandmother's hand pressed on her shoulder.

She really, really wasn't, but saying so was useless. So she nodded, and every single Lewis moved as one towards the last goodbye to their beloved family member.

The service was more awkward than anything else.

While the words of Uncle Michael had been strangely comforting and exactly what Dad would have wanted, and Grandma's had been a mix of beautiful and unholy that was so her Darcy had laughed behind the tears, and Lorna's had been a mixed bag of cats.

And then it'd been her turn and she'd stood there, silent, unable to formulate anything despite the many words she wanted to say, the speech she had prepared forgotten. She'd stood there and cried.

And it hit her, in that moment, while the casket was lowered in the ground and everyone was leaving, that unlike epic romances and fairy tales of princes and castles, that he was really, really gone.

She got to her room as if in a haze, and screamed.

She screamed to everything and everyone and to the Gods that probably heard her and maybe not and threw her stuff around.

She grabbed one of her first journals, full of birds that chipped and moved and she trashed it to shreds.

She locked herself in her room for the whole day. And the next. And the next. She didn't speak to anyone, not even to Pink who'd been silent after her violent outburst.

No one came looking for her.

After the fourth day, she ventured outside.

The pain wasn't as pronounced, but most of all, she was starting to get really hungry. Her closed stomach had suddenly opened back again.

Her mother was passed out on the sofa in the living room.

She stared, horrified, at the leftovers of what had to be two days of takeaway and probably cheap booze. The house was a mess and so was Lorna.

After checking that the woman was just sleeping (she was breathing, at least?), she rolled up her sleeves and grabbed her from the waist. She looped an arm around her shoulders (fireman carry was totally not an option, she wasn't that strong, thank you very much), and tried to get her to the bedroom. She had to give up after five minutes, the woman wasn't responsive enough to cooperate.

Okaaay, plan B . She thought, and strengthened her grip on the limp body of her donor.

She bodily dragged Lorna to her room, her shoes forgotten who knew where, and managed to put her into bed after much more strife than she'd foreseen.  She covered her hastily and then went about cleaning the house.

But when she got to her room, suddenly mindful of what she'd done to her friends, she hesitated.

She... she had killed them, hadn't she? Her friends... She...

She swallowed bile and entered her room.

There was no trace of her journals. All of them, disappeared into thin air.

How was this possible? They were there... were they?

She realized with a jolt that she hadn't seen any of her colored journals since she'd trashed that first one. Had Pink hidden them? Had they hidden themselves? Was that even possible? Even her painted birds weren't on their walls.

“...Pink?” she called hesitantly.

Miss Pink poked her head from one of her hats in the top shelf of her wardrobe. “Are you speaking to me, now?” She asked warily.

Darcy nodded, regretful. “I... I'm sorry, Pink. I, I didn't mean to do this...”

The lovebird made her way to the girl. “I know, Darcy, I know.” She landed on her shoulder and pecked a bit her earlobe. “But, you were really scary there.”

“I'm so sorry.”

Pink nodded. “Apology accepted.”

Darcy smiled slightly, and scratched Pink's head a bit. “You're the best, Pink. Did you hide the rest of the journals?”

Pink looked at her strangely. “No, I didn't.” She then pointed with her wing to the open window. “Darcy, you sent them away.”

“I did what?!”

The bird nodded vigorously. “Sent them away. The birds. All the birds. Out with their pages. Who knows where they are now...”

She almost threw herself to the window and looked at the outside, horrified. She couldn't possibly have animated more than eight hundred birds.

But sure enough, stuck in a cobweb on the tree that faced her bedroom, was a paper thin, white hummingbird she'd drawn when she was thirteen. She leaned out of the window as much as she could, but couldn't reach it.

And so, watching left and right, careful that no one was looking, she reached into her powers and gently coaxed the bird free.

The hummingbird flew back to her meekly, and as soon as it got back into the bedroom, shivered and became the journal page he'd come from.

“ March 8 th , today we've learnt how not to piss off Mr Winslow's dog.... ” She started. Pink cheeped excitedly from the top of her head. “Ha! I remember this one! I was awesome there! Get to the crunchy bit!”

But Darcy wasn't really listening.

She was thinking of eight hundred paper birds going who knows where and catching the eyes of who knows who. She shivered and hastily closed her window.

Okay, don’t panic, She thought desperately. They're paper birds, how far could they have been gone? Yeah, no one's going to notice them... and it did rain yesterday, didn't it? Yes, it should be safe.

She didn't really believe herself. 

Chapter Text

The next six months were a nightmare.

Darcy had tried her absolute best to recover her birds, but there was no trace of the paper animals despite the heavy rain they had had since that night at the hospital. Magically-generated birds didn't fear water, evidently.

She supposed it was a mixed blessing, of sorts.

She hadn't dared repeat the experiment, though, and had clasped the hummingbird's page inside one of her old Captain America books her Uncle Michael had gotten her when she was much younger (she suspected Grandma had suggested it, but it was a nice read and she appreciated it a lot). The book had then been put under the bed, for good measure.

The rest of her wall paintings had been found in scattered places all over the house. They hadn't been able to leave the walls, and that was amazing, because explaining giant coloured birds would have been a problem. A very big one.

But these friends were back, and for that she was grateful.

Lorna never really recovered.

She swung between depression and apathy. Her art was the only thing that gave her some sort of peace of mind, but even with that, it wasn't uncommon to find her asleep or unconscious, her head on the kitchen counter.

And so Darcy stepped up.

She started doing all the shopping and other household responsibilities in her mother's stead.

After the first few weeks, she purchased thick white curtains for all the windows of the house. They didn't block out all the sunlight but did discourage peepers or curious neighbours. Three days later, as the dishes cleaned themselves and she tried to finish her homework on the kitchen table, Darcy was ready to declare it the best investment ever.

She now understood potential uses for her power she hadn't even thought of as a child. As a kid, the ability to create friends had been the coolest thing ever (it probably still was. Her birds were sentient beings. They couldn't talk and were in black and white, but were alive and real. She feared the moment someone found her out terribly). Now though, the ability to do four to five chores at the same time saved her so much time, even if it came at the cost of concentration and sustained visual contact.

She exploited her power as much as she could.

Despite those efforts, however, her grades were falling steadily.

As much as she tried and even with her 'unusual' boost, Darcy couldn't keep up with the added responsibilities, and as a result, her academic performance was getting worse. And of course, her teachers had noticed.

They tried to be understanding of course, but couldn't really help reminding her of the need to keep pace, lest she lose the scholarship she needed for her college. She was so close, she just needed to focus for another three months.

Three months seemed three years, from her point of view.

She started dreaming less and had more nightmares. The bags under her eyes deepened in alarming shades of black and blue. She was drowning, and there was no escape.

Salvation came three weeks later.

“Darcy, dear! How splendid to see you!”

Darcy stared, incredulous. It was Grandma.

“G-grandma?! What are you doing here? And how did you even get here?!” She asked while she opened the door a little wider.

The woman followed her into the house, her eyes never leaving her granddaughter. Darcy would have found it uncomfortable if she hadn't been used to it. Susan Lewis was a master at staring. And of taking command of every situation.

She gave one long look at the kitchen, where the pan was sizzling and the fridge was semi-opened and half-empty and in two seconds flat she was already making breakfast.

“So...” Darcy started as they ate. Her eyes kept darting to the clock on the wall. “Are you going to answer my question?”

"What, can't I come and see my favourite baby girl, now?” the woman asked jovially.

“...It's Wednesday. And it's eight in the morning.” Darcy deadpanned, unimpressed. “How long have you been on the road? Did you drive from Virginia?!”

“Why, of course not. I was just coming back from a trip and I thought, whyever not visit my dearest Darcy? And here I am!” Grandma said cheerily. “So, what's today plan?”

“...School. I mean, breakfast, and then school.” she amended quickly at the woman's look. She took another large gulp of juice and stabbed a slice of bacon with her fork. Grandma's cooking was better than anything she could make.

“Well, then! I wouldn't want to keep you from school, dear, why don't you go ahead. I'll just... make myself home a bit and then we can talk when you're back.”

“Sure.” She answered suspiciously. Darcy didn't really believe Grandma was coming back from a trip, but it was getting late and she really didn't have time to stay and try to find out what was going on anyways. “I'll be back for dinner...”

“Absolutely!” Grandma almost physically steered her to the door. Pushy. “Have a nice day dear.” And closed the door. What.

Darcy couldn't wait to be home. She'd picked up the groceries and was just about ready to call it a day.

She reached the front of her house, nearly skipping.

“...You!”

She stopped. Voices were coming from the house.

“How dare you!” That was Lorna. “Coming into my house and telling me what to do!”

She rushed into the house. The voices came from the kitchen, and--

Her mother and grandmother were facing one another around the kitchen counter.

Lorna was gripping a spatula. At least it wasn't a knife. The detail was somehow important to Darcy's distracted thoughts.

She was gesticulating wildly and breathing heavily. Her cheeks were stained and she looked very discomposed. It wasn't much different than her quirky phase, but the crazed look was very out of place instead of her usual confused one.

She turned quickly in Darcy's direction. “Why are you home so late?!”

Darcy felt a spark of irritation bubbling. “I was getting food. I always do it, almost every day.”

Lorna faltered for a second but charged on heedlessly. Grandma was forgotten once a new, easier target had presented herself. “You should be doing your homework instead. Go to your room!”

“Excuse me?!” Darcy wasn't a confrontational girl, but this conversation really made no sense.

“I agree with your mother, Darcy dear.” Her grandmother shocked her into silence.

“What? You're sending me to my room, like a little kid?”

“Of course not, dear!” And there it was, the strained smile. “Your mother and I just need to talk about something important really quickly, then I'll make some dinner.”

Her mother sputtered from her corner, brandishing the spatula, and mouthed 'make some dinner' like she couldn't really believe it.

“Now, Darcy, please. Your room.”

Darcy opened her mouth to protest, but the look in Grandma's eyes made her relent. She nodded slowly and made to head to her room.

“Darcy!” Pink fluttered excitedly from her perch in her room and immediately went for the woollen hat on her head.

“Hey, Pink.” She smiled. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing much.” The bird's voice was muffled by the wool. She was determined to hide in the thing as much as she could. “Your mum broke another canvas. Mel told me.”

Darcy sighed. She'd have loved to say it wasn't a common occurrence. “Did any of the birds need to run for it?”

“Nope. They don't go there anymore," Pink muttered scornfully. “The last time scared the crap out of everyone involved.”

And it was true. Convincing Lorna that no, the owl had not moved at all, there was no owl in the canvas what the hell had she been drinking, had been hard.

“Great choice.” Darcy nodded. “Have they... have they been arguing a lot?”

Pink shifted uncomfortably from her fluffy nest. “Yeah, they kind of did.”

Darcy pursed her lips. The two women had never really seen eye to eye for a while (Darcy was a favourite topic), but it had never escalated over the glacial politeness. “So Pink, homework?”

“Yes!” the bird chirped. “Race you, the fastest quiz solver wins the usual!”

“You know me too well.”

There weren't any more screams for the rest of the evening, but the air was so tense you could cut through it.

Susan was her usual cheerful self (and Darcy needed to learn her secret because this air of complete nonchalance before pouncing on your prey was seriously awesome), and even Lorna maintained a strained smile throughout the whole meal.

Darcy felt so uncomfortable she thought she might have been transported to the Twilight Zone.

“And so, Darcy dear, what are you planning to do after school? I mean, you must have started looking for a college, right?” Grandma started encouragingly.

Lorna's smile froze.

The topic of college had been opened in the house when Dad had been alive. Henry had wanted Darcy to go for Maths, or a hard Science, or even better: Accounting. He himself was an accountant, and his firm always had space for the daughter of an employee. Lorna hadn't liked the idea of spending over $40.000 a year at all, and had in no uncertain terms stated that a scholarship would be the only way they could afford to even send her.

Darcy's friends were mostly her birds, and they were no help.

The subject had then been dropped when her father died, but frankly, Darcy had been psyching herself for an uphill battle for months.

Since she had discovered that she was 'abnormal,' Darcy had known that going into anything that revolved around science and biology would have been a no-go for her. Despite her love for it and having spent the majority of her life studying the insides and outsides of birds (she knew more about the squishies of an eagle than human anatomy), fear of being discovered was too much, and she was the first to believe herself much too queer not to be 'suspicious'.

Literature, languages or any soft science would allow her proper leeway and more freedom, and she wanted that.

And then Mel had vanished, and not even her parents had been able to say where she'd been sent, and Darcy had known what she wanted to do. She just hadn't had the chance of telling her parents, yet.

“I want to study...political science.”

Lorna's fork clattered loudly on her dish. Darcy closed her eyes.

“What a splendid idea, dear!” Exclaimed Grandma, pointedly ignoring Lorna's reddening face. “Changing the world is a very nob-”

“Political Science?” Her mother whispered. “You're going for Political Science? Really?”

Darcy knew that tone. It was the reasonable tone that always evolved into a shouting match. But she wouldn't back down, not on this.

“Yes.”

Lorna's look hardened so much she almost became a gargoyle.

“Your father wouldn't have approved.” She said mulishly.

Darcy stiffened. “Dad...”

“He wanted you to go into accounting,” Lorna said. “He wanted you to work at the firm he worked for, he's had your life planned ahead for years. Is that how you're going to repay him?”

“Now, wait a minute, Lorna,” Susan interjected. “Henry was a cautious man and I'm sure he had many plans regarding Darcy here, but you can't possibly say that he wouldn't have wanted the girl to follow her dreams. I know my son.”

“AND I KNEW MY HUSBAND.” She roared. “He was your son but I was his wife for twenty years!” She stood abruptly and pointed her finger at Darcy. “I'm not paying for you to follow some weird mimble wimble stupid poli-sci degree and be unemployed forever, girl! I didn't raise you for this!”

“Because you raised me, alright.”

The words were out of Darcy's mouth before she could stop herself. She slapped a hand in front of her loudly and painfully, but it was too late.

“What did you just say?”

Even Grandma paled in front of the pure look of fury on Lorna's face.

Darcy swallowed. she felt Pink shifting around on her head, but whether it was for fear or support, she didn't know.

“I said,” she stood as well, “that you didn't raise me. Dad did. You didn't even want me.”

Lorna's eyes widened before the hatred escalated a notch. Huh, she didn't think that was possible.

“Do you think Henry wanted you, huh? You were much of a surprise, I guarantee you!” Susan inhaled sharply from her seat. “We didn't want kids, we didn't NEED kids, you were just an unhappy, unholy ACCIDENT that followed us for the next seventeen years!”

Darcy had known this and didn't feel any particular love towards her mother. It still hurt.

“And you couldn't even be normal, no! Of course not, you were just going to wait until he was gone to start with your rebellions, huh? What a nice THANK YOU I get to even allow you to stay here after all of the shit you piled on us. And your father, he always worried for you! And if that's how you're gonna be from now, YOU CAN FORGET IT!” Lorna was roaring, to her or to the Heavens, Darcy didn't really know.

“Lorna!” Grandma Lewis' words were sharp, “that's not how you treat your kid. Stop saying things you don't mean before you really regret it, woman.”

“I MEAN EVERY WORD. She's no daughter of mine!”

And it hurt, oh it hurt.

Darcy's eyes filled with tears. “Is that how it is?” She murmured, and then repeated, louder, “Is that how it is?”

“Yes! That's how it is!”

“Then, FINE! I'M GONE!” She shouted at the woman, who somehow didn't expect that. “I'm going to pack this instant.” And with that she stomped away, door banging behind her.

Lorna stood there, frozen, while Grandma pressed her hands to her face.

“Nooow you've done it.”

Darcy wasn't really looking at what she was packing. She'd stormed into the room, closed her curtains and just mind-slapped clothes and objects into her suitcase.

A knock interrupted her. She hastily dropped whatever floating garment or clothing apparel she had mid-air (her blue skirt, apparently) and prepared to shout some more through her tears.

“May I come in?” Grandma's calm voice had her relax.

“Yeah, come in.”

Susan Lewis almost skipped around the room with forced cheer. That could not be healthy on her back, it just couldn't. “So, that was a heavy conversation we just had, huh?”

Darcy snorted. “No kidding.”

“Mmh.” Grandma nodded. “And it was a tiny bit more rushed than I'd have liked, but eh...”

“...Does this have any correlation at all about the motive of your visit?” she wanted to sound teasing, but it only sounded weird and suspicious.

“No, not at all!” The woman dramatically denied. “But I was thinking this is a grand idea. Since you want to move for a bit, and the climate here is so tense, you could move to Virginia with me! The house's big and empty since everyone moved,” she muttered a bit grumpily.

Darcy considered it. She actually had nowhere to go if she really was going through with this.

“...What about school?”

“We'll sort it out, dearie, don't you worry. Come on, pack up. We leave tomorrow morning first thing.”

It all sounded so easy when Grandma put it like that. So she nodded and Grandma made herself out with a cheery “Brilliant!”

And so Darcy resumed her packing.

“Hey, Darce,” started Pink. “How are we taking them with us?” She gestured to the painted birds, who had all gathered on the wall closest to the suitcase.

Darcy didn't know. She had never tried transferring wall paint to paper. Would that even work?

Her eyes fell on her Captain America book, and her mind recalled the hummingbird, changing from bird to journal page as soon as she willed it.

She eyed her homework book speculatively.

Grandma Lewis woke her up at four in the morning.

“Rise and shine Darcydear, we need to move!”

In less than an hour they were on the road, breakfast eaten. Darcy really wanted to learn that magic organisation trick too.

Lorna hadn't shown up.

As they neared the countryside, Darcy's eyes fell on White Jilian's Church and the old graveyard.

“Grandma, can we stop a second?”

Grandma's eyes darted to the church before she smiled softly. “Of course dearie.”

“...So... Hi dad?” she felt so stupid and really didn't know what had made her do it. “I... you probably know already, but I'm going with Grandma to Virginia and... I really don't want to be an accountant, dad, I'm sorry. I'm going to study political science.”

Here she brushed the tears from her eyes. “You told me to be careful, and I will, but I can't forget what happens to people that don't fit in, and I need to change that. You spent my whole life hiding this big, big secret and being so afraid for me, and sometimes? Sometimes I felt like you were scared of me, as well. And it shouldn't be like that. We shouldn't need to hide what we are because we're going to face repercussions for what we can't control. I can do it, and I will. For us, and for everyone else. So please, forgive me? And watch over me...and Lorna, she needs that too.”

Virginia was...different.

Darcy was used to the big Lewis house as a big and noisy thing during the holidays. It looked much grimier and creepier when almost empty. She kind of understood Gran for wanting to leave on frequent trips. Seriously, even the boards creaked when she moved.

But Darcy could really love it sometimes.

And Grandma was teaching her loads. Who knew she'd have a talent for knitting? Pink loved the little nests they had scattered all over.

“Hey, Darcy dear!” shouted her grandmother from the porch. “I'm going out for a bit, remember to check the stew in an hour or so!” And without waiting for an answer, she jumped into her car and left.

Darcy shook her head, smiling. Impulsive, impulsive.

She went back to studying.

“...Darce?” Pink called her.

“Yes?”

“....Is that a white eagle owl soaring towards us?”

What. “What?” Darcy's eyes snapped towards the sky. Oh my God. It was. It was unmistakable. White instead of the deep colours a real owl would have had, this was her owl. How? How was it even possible!

But the owl didn't care for logic. He soared straight to her and landed gently on the kitchen table.

He looked at her with his black beady eyes and Darcy recognised him immediately.

He gave a great shudder and became the entry of June 17 ^th of her third journal.

“Summer, it's summer, I can't believe it!-” Darcy recited dutifully. And then stopped.

Because at the bottom of the page, scribbled in a pencil that must have been cheap or even a tiny piece of carbon, was a drawing of the moon.

A drawing she hadn't done.

Lorna stepped hesitantly into her daughter's room, which she hadn't visited since the girl had turned 14 or so.

Darcy was really gone.

Of course, she wasn't an idiot, and she knew she had left the moment she'd seen the lack of any of Darcy's things in the house. But maybe, deep down, she hadn't really expected her to move.

And the white-washed empty walls were a dead giveaway as well. She couldn't imagine when the girl had cleaned the walls. She'd have noticed the white paint.

All in all, the empty room made her feel very alone.

Chapter Text

Someone had drawn on her bird.

Someone else had drawn on her alive, paper bird.

The fact that she alone was able to animate her paper journals and send away roughly 800 birds in a complete accident had been a very rough wake-up call (where had that much power come from?!). But this, the fact that one of them had survived in the wild on its own, found someone else, transformed back into paper and then found its way back to her with a message, was something she had never imagined possible.

Apparently, her birds were able to survive far from her sight, withstanding all kinds of weather, and were even intelligent enough to find their way back to her.

It was... much more power than she thought she had. And, hopefully, not a one-off.

She had to explore this new horizon that had been posed before her. Needed to.

But she tried to stay rational. The chances of it being more than a happy coincidence were very slim. Owls were some of the most intelligent and resilient birds she’d ever drawn in her journals, and an eagle owl was as big as she'd done when she was younger. She didn't have many bigger creatures to compare it to, and her wall buzzard had never left its home to become more than a pretty painting.

“Darcy, Darcy! Look !” Pink's voice was even more excited than before, and Darcy whipped her head around. There was nothing she could see, but the lovebird had a much stronger eyesight than she had, despite her size.

Oh. There it was. It... it was a seagull?

Darcy dropped the journal page she was holding and winced as the owl raised from the ground and landed on her very unprotected shoulder. Note to self, go back to big sweaters and wool. So much padding needed.

She watched with an open mouth as the white seagull dropped gracelessly from the sky, crashing on the ground and wheezing a bit. The fallen creature huffed and became paper once again.

Darcy inspected the newly-returned page critically. It was in much, much rougher condition. The ink was botched in so many places that she could hardly make out the words. She recognised it, of course–she had a good memory for her critters and would never forget August 13th  and her seagull–but she was dismayed to find entire sentences wiped off from the pages by water and probably time. She frowned and looked at the owl on her shoulder. He was still in pristine condition.

She smoothed the page as much as she could, trying to flatten the edges. And lo and behold, on the other side of the page, hastily written in red ink was a teacher's note? Good imagination, the form is too simplistic for this kind of journal. Expand on the background information. Wha–?

Well, she thought incredulously, at least she had good grammar?

But still, two of her birds had come back to her. One of them worse for wear, but in good enough condition to get home.

And that posed the question: why? Why had the owl come back as new, while the second bird, which came from a more recent and better-kept journal, had come back so battered? Had it encountered problems with wild birds? It was certainly a possibility, but seagulls were pretty big birds and flew in big flocks; it wasn't easy to prey upon them. It was also true that this bird had travelled alone all the way back to Virginia from who knew where.

And had apparently passed by a teacher's office at some point. And managed to get itself marked in red ink.  And the red ink had to be pretty recent, too, because the rest of the ink was... all... smudged ...

“Oh, my...! Pink!” She exclaimed, and Pink fell from her perch, distracted. “I think got it!” She felt like an idiot and not even the reproaching tone of the owl could keep her still.

The ink. The answer had to be the ink.

She touched the bird of prey on her shoulder, and he poofed into nonexistence in a second, becoming a journal diary once more. She fingered the rough, old paper and felt a triumphant smirk overtake her face as she took in the perfectly-penciled sentences her younger self had written.

She wasn't an expert, but she'd read somewhere that pencil, while easily erased with a normal eraser, was eternal and water-resistant forever. In fact, permanent recordings were done in graphite for this very reason. Ink wasn't.

So, it wasn't the paper that mattered for her bird's existence. It was the material upon which she'd drawn them. And it didn't matter what surface–a wall or a journal made no difference–as long as the drawing was intact. Well, at least now she knew where their magic came from.

She reached for a pencil and painstakingly rewrote the entire page as carefully as she could. And there it was, brand new and shiny white, her precious bird. He was beautiful, as majestic and soft as she remembered him. She cooed and petted him for a long time, the bird basking in the attention.

“Darcy?”

“Yes, Pink?” She answered absentmindedly, continuing to scratch her bird's head.

“...The stew...”

Well, shit.

New research was needed.

Apart from the discovery of the durability of the design (pencil was the most durable material she could find, for now. Ink was soluble in water and didn't resist time . Alcohol-based ink, while perfect for the job, was stupidly expensive ), the fact that birds were able to cross state barriers to pass on messages hadn't escaped her notice.

Her seagull had come from Maine. She'd cross-checked three times, but the only Professor Marta Jordans (which she ’d deduced was the name on the signature) taught in Maine. So her bird had left her house, got to fucking Maine and then returned to her in Virginia.

The possibilities were endless.

What was the distance she could cover with them? What were the limits? Was it possible to cross the ocean? Carry objects? My, oh my.

The only way to confirm this, though, was through thorough testing.

She spent the next three days scouring the big paper mills sites, looking for last minute sales. In the end, she managed to land an outstanding deal for a lot of paper. A lot. She quickly lost count of the times she spent going in and out of various shops to pick up her various deliveries.

Grandma was extremely chill about the whole affair. She didn't raise questions about the sudden influx of paper into the house. Instead, she limited herself to rearranging the various doilies strewn about, often placing a couple on the haphazardly-placed reams of paper ( they look so much better like this! ).

Pencils were the next thing. Too soft of a lead would smudge the drawing and 'kill' (for lack of a better term) the bird fairly quickly, but too hard of a lead would often scratch the paper. Hard pencil lead also didn't carry as much as she'd liked.

After she was fairly certain of her choice, the next problem arose: her hand was rusty. The first bird, while pleasing to the eye, didn't have half of the mechanical grace her birds used to have. Darcy resisted the urge to ball the paper and throw it away. Her mind didn't seem to have the same problem.

For the first time in over a year, Darcy was drawing again.

Darcy regarded the white, fluffy dove in front of her with pride.

She'd thought long and hard on how to test the resilience and speed of her creations.

The first possibility was to send her beloved creature to someone she trusted and have them send back a message. That idea was quickly discarded. Her friends back home weren't trusted enough that she'd feel comfortable telling them she was a mutant. It was a sure-fire way to be arrested by some shady organization. No, thank you.

Another option was to send out her birds in random directions and see where to go from there. It... didn't sound accurate in any way. She didn't think she would get any good data if she just hoped things sorted themselves out.

So, the only plausible conclusion was to use a form of completely uncensored and 100% accurate provision of information: live coverage of important events.

She went back to studying the flight patterns of birds, average speed and local breeds and species.

Then, she started timing her birds. She willed them to fly from one point to another with certainty, using her words and her powers to teach them. And they learned. Oh, they learned fast. Soon she was able to direct them from one part of the city to another without blinking. She began checking real-time weather cameras all over Virginia.

And when she felt ready enough, Darcy decided to give her next step a try. The Academy Awards ceremony was three days away, and according to her calculations, a dove would be able to cover that distance in roughly 55 hours. She decided to account for 70, just in case. Go big or go home.

She watched as her little dove flew steadily over the rooftops, and hoped it would work.

After the second day, the trepidation she felt was making her vibrate in her seat so much that Grandma asked her multiple times if she was feeling alright. The answer was always a strained 'yes', but she didn’t sound very convincing to either of them.

What if something happened? What if someone found her bird? It wasn't supposed to transform back into a journal page, as she had left no message on it, but she hadn't really studied how it could behave in front of other people.

She couldn’t taste dinner that night, her insides twisting more and more.

On the third day, she was ready to call it quits due to nerves.

She was bundled up in her big bedroom on the third floor under an entire blanket fort. Grandma had covered her with the entirety of the Lewis homemade quilts and threatened to smother her in mittens and scarves. She had even declared Darcy ill and had refused to let her go to school.

Darcy was forced to wear every single layer until the fever 'died'.

As they approached the time for the famous and celebrated red carpet, she found herself brimming with newfound excitement and expectations.

The celebrities started milling inside the hotel, sparkling with their shining dresses and smiles, and the more the show went on the more nervous Darcy became. Until suddenly there was a flurry of wings in front the camera, and a white dove planted herself quite clearly on the rooftop nearby.

Darcy's heart skipped a beat.

The dove turned towards the camera and blinked.

Darcy's heart leapt into her throat.

It worked. She'd just sent a paper bird from one coast of the United States to another!

She broke out into an impromptu dance that made no sense, but Grandma laughed and so did Pink. Life was good.

From then on, Darcy's experiments didn't stop.

She started experimenting with oceans and more impressive distances but discarded the idea of sending anything over Korea or China, and South Africa was a minefield just waiting to explode. So, she set her sights on Europe.  

Darcy didn't feel extremely comfortable with sending a tiny bird, so this time she sent a migrating goose. Geese could comfortably fly at the speed of 50mph and were a common bird in Europe. To cover her bases, she sent a couple more to keep a 'V-formation' over the overpopulated areas, just in case.

It took the geese over seven days, but they were spotted over Rome by a weather camera.

It was impressive. It was powerful. It was hers.

This kind of power was intoxicating to young Darcy. She was realistic enough to see that it wouldn't probably be a superpower unless she could use it in some way that didn't involve her revealing herself to the world, but the hopeful Political Science student could see how useful eyes on the whole world could be.

And then, Darcy’s perspective shifted. Again.

She was on her way home from school when a soft plop on her head startled her. She mechanically reached up to her hat and felt the distinctive texture of paper under her fingertips.

Balled under her hand was a paper sparrow that belonged to her old 12yrs old journal.

She opened the page hesitantly, careful not to destroy it any more than it was already.

Jotted under the lines she'd written in her scrawl were simple, black words.

'Thank you. Your words saved my life.'

Oh.

Oh. She'd known, abstractly, that her birds could carry messages and that people were able to read them. She just... she hadn't thought the words of twelve years old Darcy would have made a difference to anyone.

Maybe eyes on the world and espionage and superpowers weren't her thing, but this? This she could actually do. Bring comfort to people while staying completely anonymous and using a power unique to her was something she could totally do. She rocked at self-care tips. Yes, that was easily done!

She was so excited about her newfound mission that she hardly noticed the curious looks she attracted on the street.

That night, she sent out ten birds with hopeful and meaningful messages (some of them were motivational quotes, but they had the original reference and even the backdate, so!).

Of the ten messages, a bloated, fat swallow came back two days later.

Scribbled in what seemed to be fluent coffee stains, filled to the brim with scribbles that were undecipherable,  were the words

“The Einstein-Rosen bridge is R E A L!!!”

Huh.

Chapter Text

Okay, maybe it was time to stop.

There was a white swallow on her windowsill.

She was pretty sure she'd seen it before, maybe? She blinked lazily and then kept her eyes closed for five seconds. When she opened them, the swallow was staring at her like she'd grown a second head. And Jane felt silly, too. The bird was real, and it was... insistent to enter the room?

Yeah, no. Not happening.

“Shoo!” she gestured at the bird, who didn't even blink. “Go away!” Nothing.

She turned her back on the window in her tiny office at Culver University and for the rest of the day forgot about the white animal watching her.

She would have continued to ignore its existence if it weren't for the fact that she needed coffee and her assistant was nowhere to be found. Well, he's useless recently, he's never around.

When she got back, the bird was doing a very decent job at window pecking. Once it noticed her, the bird immediately went back to its starting, pleading position. “Are you kidding me?” she raised an eyebrow, incredulous, and then raised the other when the bird inclined his head and enlarged his eyes in a wonderful imitation of a puppy eye look. It was very believable.

“I'm not going to open it--I've watched The Birds, you know?” It was stupid to talk to a bird, but the white thing seemed able to understand her as if it was intelligent. Oh no, she was starting to think of birds as intelligent creatures, she really had gone mad!

Still, she had much to do today, and readings didn't read themselves... And where the Hell was her assistant, again? She started knocking on the various doors of the floor. They were almost empty anyway, not many people were around during vacation. “Jason?” she called.

There was a scrambling sound, a muffled gasp incoming from the printer room. She watched bewildered as a girl, who was most certainly not Jason, scrambled out of it, awkwardly bowed quickly and retreated just as fast.

Jason followed soon after. “Sorry, Dr Foster,” he babbled. “I... We... You usually don't...”

Jane Foster closed her eyes, shook her head and put up her hands to stop him. “I... really don't want to know. Just... never ever talk about that again. On second thought no, never ever be caught again, so I can pretend it never happened.”

“Yes, Doctor Foster!” The kid fumbled.

“And start copying the data down! Those readings tonight were the clearest we’ve gotten since the last meteor shower.”

“Yes, Dr Foster!”

She went back, very satisfied with herself. Having minions was such a great thing, this was probably why teachers said that the job had its perks. Not having to copy and collate data was the best thing to ever happen to her, after coffee. And, she noticed with a smile, “I can hear you grumbling, Jason!” made the minion yelp every single time.

The bird was still there. It was making soft pleading noises now. Jane couldn't see why it wanted to enter her office so much. She followed his insistent gaze and noticed with some embarrassment an old Pop-tart lying under some of her data. Ah. Of course, it was food, what the hell was she thinking.

She held the bitten treat in her hands and looked at the bird, and the bird looked back. “You want this thing?” The bird nodded enthusiastically. “Okay, you get this thing, and then you're gone?” She felt ridiculous, but the bird nodded again.

So she held the Poptart very far from her face, inched closer and opened the window.

The swallow was holding itself very, very still.

Jane inched the Poptart a bit closer.

The moment her fingers were a millimetre from the white bird's plumage, the swallow literally died.

Jane watched horrified as the bird fell on the windowsill, stiff as a board. She gasped and retreated immediately. The bird lay still, dead.

She cautiously scooted closer to the window and prodded the poor creature. It gave a great shudder, and before her eyes, cross her heart hope to die, it transformed into a freaking sheet of paper.

She took it from the window, and yep, that was paper. It felt like paper. It looked like paper. Yep, yep. She was not nearly awake enough for this. Nope. She took a great gulp of coffee, nd promptly spat it out.

These were her notes. Her notes. On a magical paper bird that was probably a mirage. Oh God, this was her life. She'd been talking all afternoon with a folded paper that looked like a bird but was actually paper and it was her notes all along and what, where did these notes come from because these weren't on her hard-drive!

But this was her handwriting and she remembered this thing she'd written like two weeks ago. And yes, even the Einstein-Rosen bridge conclusion. All there.

This is absurd. She thought. So, so absurd. I must be hallucinating.

And yet, here it was.

She reread it avidly (her handwriting wasn't that terrible, thank you). In the last lines, there was someone else's handwriting.

Hi! I'm sorry, I don't have enough understanding of... physics? To get what you're saying, but I'm sure it's awesome. ...What's an Einstein-Rosen bridge? I love Science but this is so out of my league... but it s ounds cool!

Eh... Oh boy, where to start? Well, it was rare to find that someone was interested enough to ask, since in her field everyone knew of her theory and had already discarded it, and … even if it was a magical paper origami...

By the time her brain caught up with her, she was writing an explanation of the basics of physics to a stranger magical bird. On its... skin? Maybe? She was writing on it, so, maybe.

 “Dr Foster?” Jason's voice made her look up, “It's late, shouldn't we be heading home?” He actually sounded pleading.

Jane watched as her phone pinged the 8 pm on the display. Yes, it was late.

“Yes, Jason, of course, you go ahead... I'll just... finish this...” 

Jason looked at her strangely. “Finish what?”

She blinked “Oh this thing I'm writing here I...” The bird was gone.

The paper was gone, well, the bird, the paper bird thing was gone. Her hand was still mid-movement and the thing was gone. She searched the room. Nothing, gone.

Her notes, her strange letter to the weird magic thing. Poofed. And the window slammed behind her back.

A much fatter swallow was flying away at top speed. The thing. With her notes.

“Son of a -!”

Chapter Text

Hi, Janie!

How are you today?

I had no idea E.'s laws could work like that! It's amazing if you think about it. But what about the rainbow? Because it sounds like a rainbow to me?

I heard that Professor Banner left Culver a couple of years ago... he probably could’ve h elped more than I can.

And I'm so glad you got rid of that leech! He didn't deserve you anyways....

Jane Foster was a genius. An absolute, undisputed genius.

Her mind could change the world.

Darcy didn't understand much of Science!--she’d avoided hard sciences like the plague since she'd been given the choice and had so much to catch up on, but her new pen-pal didn't seem at all put-out. Jane had started sending her paragraphs of interesting concepts that even someone with zero experience could read, and she took to it like a duck to water. It was incredible to see that she could actually understand what Jane was teaching her.  

However, Jane Foster's life didn't seem to be all sunshine and rainbows. First of all, try as she might, Darcy couldn’t find any information about the woman apart from her working at Culver and some interesting papers from when she was still in school. Anything she'd written on physics had been rejected by Science-y journals and moved to very unimportant ones (they were brilliant essays and papers, how dare they!), and her latest assistant had apparently run off with some girlfriend and left Dr Foster to fend for herself.

The woman didn't seem to know how to take care of herself either, according to Darcy’s birds. They relayed increasingly-worrying news about the woman forgetting to eat or sleep in order to pursue her Science!

The fact that she couldn't physically help the woman worried her. She'd felt a solid connection to Jane in the weeks they'd been talking. Jane still believed she was speaking to a sentient bird, but that was another matter entirely.

Her birds couldn't carry solid items. Well, that wasn't exactly true. They could carry very light weights compared to their paper selves, and the big ones were able to carry small pebbles, but that was basically it. One of her bigger creatures, a puffy eagle that had been drawn with the last drops of her extremely-precious, extremely-expensive, alcohol-based oil-covering Felt pen, could safely deliver woollen hats and scarves (Jane had been extremely grateful). It was slightly disappointing, but not unexpected. Pink herself was limited to the abilities of her species despite being her most powerful creation to date. She supposed that were she to give one of her eagles the same powers and life Pink had received, they'd be able to carry much, much bigger things. It was something to consider in the case of an emergency (another talking real immortal bird was not something Darcy was willing to create anytime soon).

That didn't stop her from purchasing another expensive alcohol-based pen, though. Her wallet cried a little at the price tag ($22 for a single pen was a robbery), but Darcy swallowed and paid it all. In the end, it was so worth it.

A care package with cookies was quickly sent in Jane Forster's direction.

You aren't really a bird, are you?

Or did you steal the cookies? Because they were delicious and I want a thousand of them but if you stole them then you're a bad bird and you need to stop it. Oh my G od, did you steal the cookies?

Am I accomplice to cookie theft? I'm an accessory, I knew it!

No, but seriously, this bird is bigger than the last one. Like, a lot.

Is this tech? Like Stark Tech or something?
Or maybe it's magic! Are you a mutant? Because this, whatever it is, is not possible. Not possible at all....

Darcy exhaled from her nose and closed her eyes.

She didn't have any intention of keeping the fact that she was a person secret, but she'd become good at procrastinating. I'll tell them the next time had become a mantra in her head. She was corresponding with four to five people on and off, and with Jane on a permanent basis, so someone was due to add two and two. Of course, it was Jane.

She munched on her pencil (and then stopped, horrified, because pencil-munching should have stopped when she was eight and oral fixations were bad) and tried to pen a satisfactory answer.

Hi Jane,

No? I mean, I didn't steal the cookies, obviously, I made them myself. And of course I'm not a bird? I'm a person. I mean, last I checked I was human!

They have names and everything, by the way, you offend their sensibilities if you call them bird. The big one's Neal and the swallow's Apus (yes, from the Star), don't get them mixed up!!

I hope I didn't destroy your hopes by telling you I'm not, in fact, a talking bird? But I have met some in my life, if that makes you feel better?

Jane's answer was almost instantaneous.

Okay.

I have questions.

Having established that no, Darcy didn't know how she got this kind of power, no, she was not willing to 'give it a test', not even for Science, and no, she had never tried to see if she had different abilities (and while she liked Jane there was no way she was telling her anything more than that), Jane was actually chill about the whole affair. She did ask for a lot more baked goods, though.

Darcy was very relieved her... friend? Was okay with the whole thing. She still feared the police or the Men in Black would come to her house, but not as much as the days after she sent the first letter.

“Darcy! Did you find the red suitcase?” Grandma Lewis's voice sounded muffled from the garage. Darcy critically eyed the room and then checked again. Nope. She tried looking for it with her powers, but apart from some very funny backpacks, there was no red suitcase in sight.

“Where did you put the thing...?” she raised her voice. “Not here, Grandma!”

Grandma Lewis grunted something that could have been a curse or a recipe for tacos, but Darcy was so far away from the garage it was a miracle she heard it at all.  

They'd been looking for suitcases and backpacks the whole week. Susan Lewis had what had to be the weirdest, most original collection of luggage ever. She had tiny ones with flowers and big ones with symbols that were 'in' during the sixties (or Jamaica… in Jamaica they would fit right in...), blue ones, pink ones, and one with white fat ponies as a pattern. Of course, she needed the red one--the only one they couldn't find.

Grandma had won another set of tickets and was leaving for a tour with her friends ( Now that you're 18, Darce, and moving to college soon, it's time I get back on the road! ). She was pretty pumped about it and Darcy basked in her infectious enthusiasm.

“Found it!” Came from behind her.

Darcy started, and all the luggage expertly levitating over her head dropped unceremoniously to the ground. She stood frozen like a deer in the headlights.

“Darcy? Did you hear me?” Grandma asked, confused.

“Yes, I heard you.”

“Don't just stand there then, peanut, come and help me!” Grandma impatiently moved her hands in a 'come on come on' gesture. “I need to be on the road in two days if I want to be back before you leave! It's so great that you're going to college... Changing the world, you're going to take them by storm...”

Did...did Grandma not see what she had been doing?

For the rest of the day they packed and moved stuff without pause, but Darcy couldn't stop thinking about what her grandmother must have seen.

They finished their job well into the night, with all kind of clothes strewn all over the place.  Hawaiian shirts sat beside orange sunglasses and furry looking hats (That had prompted some interesting stories involving an activist and a can of tomato sauce). Pink had stolen a couple of stockings and was now making a very comfy nest out of it.

They sat on the sofa eating out of a carton since no one of them really wanted to cook after the ordeal. Packing was exhausting.

“So...” Darcy hedged nervously, “did you... did you see what I did today?”

The woman slowly blinked and turned to face her. “You mean the flying stuff in the attic?”

Darcy coughed. “Yeah...”

“Oh, Darcy!” The woman chuckled at her, “you say that as if it was news! I am your grandmother, you know? I used to babysit you all the time during the summer, did you really expect that I'd never notice?”

Darcy opened her mouth and closed it quickly. When you put it like that... “And, it doesn't bother you?”

“Oh please. I've seen weirder things in my life, peanut. This woman's no longer a spring chicken but she knows what she's talking about!”

“You have?!”

“I did!” Grandma Lewis confirmed proudly. “I've seen it all in my travels.”

“Have you? Have you really?” Pink piped up from her nest, and then slapped a wing over her beak when Darcy swung her alarmed eyes at her.

Susan Lewis blinked rapidly. “Well, now I can say that I have.” And looked meaningfully to her granddaughter.

Darcy laughed nervously. “Pink is... a bit special?”

“She's special alright... “ Susan looked at the bird thoughtfully as it puffed proudly from her nest made of stockings. “That explains why I never had to pay for bird food, anyway. But! I digress! I meant it when I said I saw stranger things and this one's quite tame. I saw a green Sasquatch once!”

“Ooh!” Pink chipped unhelpfully.

“Yup. In Canada! Must have been... what, three years ago? I think it was.”

“A green Sasquatch,” Darcy said flatly. Well, she could move and animate stuff with her mind using some weird powers she couldn't explain, so yeah, it might have been possible for a Sasquatch to be green. Or for a giant ape to exist and be contaminated by radioactive stuff and become green. Despite what people were saying left and right, pollution and climate change were real.

“I did! I did!” the old woman was nodding ahead, “And then I saw it in Mexico too. I even have pictures!”

Darcy's eyes widened, “You have pictures? Can I see?”

The woman smiled and patted her knees, “of course, I just need to find them, now where did I put them...” she stared into nothing, deep in thought. “...You don't happen to be able to find stuff with those levitating powers of yours, do you?”

Darcy shook her head. “Sorry. I... kinda need visual contact to move stuff, and I don't even know what your photos look like?”

“No matter, I'll find them!” The woman wasn't a 'spring chicken', but damn if she didn't have the energy to bounce off a sofa after a whole day of heavy lifting. Darcy wanted to be her when she grew up.

She busied herself with throwing the empty cartons away while her grandmother looked around the mess that was now their house for her photographs.

“Aha! Found theeem!” was the triumphal shout that greeted her when she was back a while later.

And yep, there is was. A huge, green man with ...pants? Running in the snowy forest, his green features a stark contrast from the white of the snow.

“So this was Canada, and it was exactly 2 years ago. See? Totally wasn't lying! It's grainy because we were on the bus already but if you squint you can even see the pants’ stretch marks!” Grandma was prattling, “And this! This is Mexico but I have no idea how he got into that bar, anyway.”  She handed her a series of pictures she'd taken. Grandma just didn't do 'digital'.

“Bar?” Darcy questioned.

“Yep. A few minutes before he's not there, see how me and Maggie took this picture while we were drinking, it was a dare with Sally that couldn't come by the way,” grandma was pointing at their laughing faces, “and one second later there it is and we're all running away?”

The green man was huge this time. Perfectly caught with the tiny disposable camera souvenir shops used to sell, he was shouting at something or someone, his expression a mask of pure rage. A bit further on his right, there was a man that might have had a gun. Maybe.

“Can I keep these?” She asked her grandmother.

“Of course!” Susan waved her hand dismissively, “I'm leaving tomorrow and I don't need them, stare at them all you want! And don't you worry about your 'secret',” she mimed air quotes with her hands, “I haven't talked for eighteen years of your life, and I won't start judging now!” and she winked.

Hello, my mysterious person that speaks to me with birds made of magical paper,

is there something else I can call you? Because this is a bit ridiculous to write every day.

The latest cookies were delicious.

This bird hates that I write on it, why? He just won't stay still!

And I have questions about him, or it, or whatever. What is he made of? And don't say paper because 'magical paper' is the closest I've come to rationalize this thing....

Darcy kept staring at the pictures of the green man in Mexico.

The 'spawning' of a giant man in the middle of a bar could not be explained. Then again...

She stared hard at the point where the Sasquatch was in the second picture. In the first picture, there was a man. She squinted.

Well, if you looked at them with your head a bit turned, the man with the rumpled hair and the green man looked similar? And they had the same pants, too.

This could not be a coincidence, Darcy thought, elated. The man and the giant were one the same! What a fascinating, strange power he had!

And then she realised that while her power was easy to hide, his must have made him more of an outcast than she would ever be. Because her father's words resonated in her “ Some people look normal, some have green skin or antennae.” How did you hide something like this? It must be terrible.

She could just imagine what the government would and could do with someone with such a power, and thinking of the dark labs and the experiments and the horror stories made her shudder from head to toe. What a horrible, horrible curse to have.

She felt a pit of despair wash over her, a wave of empathy towards this poor man. She wanted to help him.

She didn't know how.

In the end, it was the arrival of Neal the eagle that gave her the idea.

According to these pictures, the man moved from Canada to Mexico, so it stood to reason that he was heading south. Maybe Brazil? Chile? She had no idea, but she knew how to reach out to him.

She took out her birds atlas, found what she was looking for, and dipped her special pen onto the most resilient paper roll she had found over the years. Alcohol didn't melt one bit with water and this allowed her creatures to travel from Europe or Asia completely unimpeded. South America was bound to be stupid easy for them.

The southern fulmar was as close as reality as she could get. She'd stress tested it with water (he'd loved it) and explained with conviction who to look for and how not to be seen by others. Pink translated the bird's affirmative cry with efficiency.

She watched with grim satisfaction as 'Ben' flew away following the coast, southbound.

Janey,

you keep covering Neal in coffee stains and using a pen to write on him. Stop it, he hates it!

Stop drinking coffee while you write and read and go back to using pencils. Seriously.

Coffee stains are a pain to get out of their feathers. It's gross.

And I guess? I mean, you can call me P. If you want?

Love, P.

Chapter Text

Hi Janey,

Do you think they’re watching us? The people beyond your stars , I mean.

Eat all of the stuff Neal brought you, he said you look thinner and you haven’t slept in three days. How’s the search for an assistant going? I’m sorry you’re all alone, but that Jason was a jerk.

I’ll have to send you more food. Preferences?

Love, P.

Three things changed once Darcy got into Culver and moved away from her Grandmother’s house.

The first, most notably, was the sudden immersion into the weird world of p eople . Ever since she was thirteen and had changed schools, Darcy had tried to lay as low as possible in order to avoid attracting attention, and as a result, her social life had suffered a lot. While she’d been very popular when she had been younger, she was no longer used to the level of social awareness that was once again required of her. However, the sheer number of people around her also made her feel very secure.

If in her little city she’d lived with the nightmare of someone noticing her powers and whisking her away to some weird facility, in Culver the chances of her being tagged as ‘mutant’ were extremely slim. Heck, her flatmate was the very definition of weird, with her smelly incenses and rituals in the middle of the night. For that, she was allowed some sort of leeway for not being extremely focused every morning.

And that brought her to the second point, the difficult cohabitation she, and especially Pink, had with their very rambunctious flatmate. Glind a-- and that was her real, honest to God name (and Darcy could empathise with her and weird names because Glinda was a terrible name no matter how you looked a t it) --a bsolutely hated them. Well, maybe hate was a strong word , but loudly proclaiming that their mere presence was scrambling her chakras every time they got any closer than six feet was becoming absurd. She had agreed to let Pink stay with them despite it being borderline allowed (it wasn’t, it so wasn’t, but Glinda was apparently a ‘rebel’ and sticking it to ‘the suits’ was more important than sticking it to her personal chakra scrambler), but complained even more loudly about her.

Things escalated quickly when Darcy found her trying to salt her bird. Of course, Pink being no more a demon than she was, the results were extremely underwhelming (and Pink had been very pissed off). Since then, however, Glinda no longer tried to accuse the lovebird of being a supernatural being of evil.

The third thing Darcy noticed was that h er social awareness, or lack thereof, was giving her more trouble than it was probably worth (she didn’t care). Her mouthiness and sarcasm, which had been cultivated watching Grandma Lewis and that she now had down to an art, had put her on the radar of at least three different frat boys. And okay, maybe it hadn’t been exactly classy to doubt their masculinity and virility on front of the whole cafeteria that day, but they had been very insistent and yep, in the end they had asked for it . She wasn’t going to back down from the point. Besides, she hadn’t even used violence to put them in their place.

Th at event, however, spurred her into looking for some kind of protection for herself, because it wasn’t even six months in and she’d already made enemies. Yeah. Enrolling into s elf-de fense classes became suddenly a priority.

Grandma Lewis had kept in touch from wherever she was (maybe she was in Chile, now? She didn’t know), an d v ery promptly sent her a taser the fourth week in. Darcy hadn’t even known Grandma knew what a taser was, but she appreciated it nonetheless. She started tinkering with it from the first moment.

Dissecting items to discover h ow they worked was the first step to understanding and recreating the item in her mind. And the more she recreated it, the more she understood and could use it. After three weeks, Darcy was confident she could pull the trigger of her Sparky without touching or seeing it, as long as she could feel it in her pocket. She’d had no reason to use it so far, but she knew better than to try her luck.

And then defence classes picked up, and while she wasn’t the n ext Wo nder Woman, she found herself surprisingly capable of handing people th eir arse. Nothing special, but it got the job done long enough to get away and scream at the top of her lungs (or fire the taser she absolutely did. not. have. ).

Hello, P.

The scarf was beautiful, how did you manage such a precise star pattern? I love it.

I’ve finally put out another ad for an intern, I hope the next one is better-
Your birds have terrible manners. They peck me until I answer your mail, it’s rude.

Love, Jane.

Ten months in, Darcy was finally ‘home’.

She and Glinda had reached some kind of truce for their survival. Darcy would keep to her side of the apartment, would especially keep Pink on her side of the living space and try to stay out of the common area when Glinda was there.
On her part, Glinda would also stay out of her hair and side as much as possible.

They were basically strangers living in the same space.

“Seriously, you’re better off without her.” Daisy, her friend from Histor y, t old her one day.
They were sitting outside, because for once the weather was nice enough to let them out without resembling a poor imitation of an Inuit ( that didn’t mean Darcy wasn’t wearing two scarves and a woolen hat).

“She’s not bad, she’s just… different. Frankly, I think we could be great friends if she stopped saying I’m an abomination that should never have happened.” And since that hit a lot closer to home than she’d liked, Darcy usually tried not to think about it too hard. “What pissed me off was her trying to salt Pink that one time, really.”

“She tried to exorcise your bird !?” Daisy parroted her, incredulous .

“Salt her, not exorcise. It’s different…” she defended automatically. Best not bring religion into the discussion.

Daisy didn’t sound convinced at all. “You should move in with us, seriously.”

“I would!” Darcy pouted, “but then she’d win, and seriously, we just got this truce going…”

Daisy snorted and made to say something, but then, “Hey! What’s that!”

Darcy followed her gaze, and sure enough soaring towards them was a white pigeon.

She paled. Sweat trickled down her back. It couldn’t possibly…

But the bird went away on its business and flew over them to literally fall against a car window with a sound ‘splat’.

They both winced. “Ouch.”

“That must have hurt,” Daisy commented, but then she took a long look at her. “Hey, Darcy, you look awfully pale, are you okay?”

She wasn’t. Her paranoia had spiked in the twenty seconds it had taken that poor pigeon to slam itself on the car, and even if it clearly wasn’t one of hers, but probably just a common albino bird, she couldn’t tear her eyes off it.

She stammered a couple of apologies about not feeling too well and beat a hasty retreat home, leaving a perplexed Daisy in her wake.

Over the next few days she kept seeing white pigeons everywhere she went.

If it w eren’t for Pink, she would have forgotten to reply to Jane, as well, which couldn’t be allowed to happen ( she’s going to die of starvation, Pink! ).

Her birds were regular occurrences in her life now . She was always very careful not to receive any in public, and some of them had started to sneak into her mailbox (she hadn’t taught them that, but it had worked so far so she wasn’t going to complain), but she was corresponding with a few people already.
She hadn’t sent a pigeon, so rationally she understood she was just being paranoid.

But she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was always seeing the same bird, doggedly albeit clumsily following her.

The bird had smashed against windows, three cars, two trash cans and picket fences with impunity. He was so clumsy, he’d become a meme around the campus. Groups of boys and girls would be spotted all around Culver trying to take a picture of the next disaster.

It had become such a ‘thing’ that Darcy started to put it on the back of her mind because apparently, it was just a stupid pigeon that just loved the college she’d picked.

And for a while, she even forgot about it.

Jane was having some sort of scientific breakthrough and was writing very excitedly every two or three days. It probably would have taken less time now that they were basically three minutes apart, but she still had the birds fly all around the state border before going back to Culver, just in case.

You don’t understand, it changes EVERYTHING.

And on it went about science!babble and equations she couldn’t possibly understand unless she came back to physics and somehow became a genius in a week (which wasn’t happening anytime soon!), but she appreciated being kept in the loop all the same and always replied with the same enthusiasm and loads of baked goods. As it turned out, food bought you a lot of leeway with despondent flatmates too.

She was so focused on Jane that on Mon day, when the entire class was snoozing during a debate about canned preserves that was as interesting as watching paint dry, s he and half the class jumped when Bombing Pigeon decided that why yes, today was a wonderful day to test the classroom windows.

Some of the girls screamed, some of the guys jum ped up with their phones to film the white bird slide with a ‘gneeee’ sound along the window , and the Professor was still blinking nonplussed at the sudden movement in his classroom (he had no idea preserves were that fascinating, he’d have to try this again next year!).
Darcy could only watch as the bird flopped almost lifelessly on the windowsill, but then shook hard, and flew back into the sky.

She had seen his little legs though, and they were chalk white.

She had no idea how it was possible, but it was a paper bird.

She spent the evening looking for the confused (concussed? nonpl ussed?) pigeon, going so far as almost spending the night out. Glinda had actually called her twice to ask if she needed to call th e police, which was-- nice? Yeah, weird, but very nice of her.

No sign of Bombing Pigeon anywhere.

In the end, she had to give up, there was no way she would be finding a pigeon in the dark--

SPLAT-KACHEENG. (Gneeeeeee)

Okay, this? S hould be statistically impossible. She looked around and yep, there it was, a turned-over trash can with tiny little legs peeking out of it.

She chanced a good look around. Okay, no one close enough to see anything . She walked to the bin and straightened it. Then took a big breath, and poked the paper bird.

It shuddered, tried to contract, and flopped back into a bird once again. She frowned and stroked it along the back. It felt like pa per, it was the exact same material as her birds, and it was one of her sketches.

But it wasn’t working. T he bird wasn’t changing back. Why?!

Darcy took her creation into her trembling hands, and gently put it in her bag. Pink had told her the birds didn’t really feel pain, but she wasn’t going to stuff a living creature into a container like a Tetris piece.

She ran home as fast as she could, and she must have had the most spooked expression ever on her face, because Glinda asked her at least five times if she was actually fine. The girl was so adamant Darcy needed help that she actually threatened to call in the supervisor of their apartment building.

In the end, after thirty long minutes of cajoling her not to worry , cooking something for dinner, and avoiding her suspicious looks for the rest of the evening (spent in the same common room but in separate parts of it while watching a completely uninteresting program that none of them liked), she managed to retreat to her room.

She took the pigeon out of her bag, and Pink fluttered up to perch on her head.

She prodded and touched the bird, but it wouldn’t change back.

Pink was becoming as agitated as she was. “Why isn’t it changing back?”

“I don’t know, Pink.” She whispered.

The bird started chirping a bit faster than a real pigeon would, its shrill sounds very uncomfortable. “It’s saying he’s trying but he can’t.” Pink translated dutifully, nervous.

“Okay, okay, don’t panic!” She told the birds.

She closed her windows and turned off the lights. She closed her eyes and reached for her powers.

As usual, Darcy felt it under her skin, and the bird chirped before changing back into a very old journal page.

Darcy fingered it before turning on the bedside lamp and checking it over frantically.

Apart from her childlike scribbles, there were notes.

A lot of notes in a language she didn’t understand at all. It looked… sort of Arabic? Persian, maybe? And certainly made with a pen that had much nicer ink than the most expensive one she had. It looked barely stained and chipped and she’d adore one of these pens because this bird had lived over two years on its own with only a few squiggles of this thing and had so much energy it wouldn't change back!

At the end of the page, written in the only English thing she’d seen in the whole page, was the signature Dr Yinsen, Ho.

P,

What are you doing with notes in Dari? And where did you get these?
It’s clearly Farsi, or Dari... call it as you wish.

Do you… do you have contacts with Afghanistan?! It’s…

I have questions!

Jane.

Chapter Text

To whoever this may concern,

I found your notes on my bird. He’s got direct orders not to let anybody else touch it, but you never know… Check where you’re writing, dude!
Anyways, here it is.
I hope you’re well, and that these notes weren’t urgent, because I’m pretty sure it takes weeks to reach the US from where you are.
On a non-related note, that pen you’re writing with is amazing, is it oil based?
Well wishes, P.

November was fast approaching and Darcy could finally say she and Glinda were almost friends. Of course, she could say this because Glinda had moved for her internship and she would be alone in the apartment for the next couple of months, but yep.

She stretched leisurely and opened Glinda’s windows.

She’d been asked to keep her room aired from time to time and what the hell, she could totally do it. It also gave her a great way to use (abuse) her powers, since her flatmate’s room was directly in front of a windowless wall of the nearby building, so no onlooker would ever be tempted to watch.

The first time she used her powers for something different than animating birds, she felt terribly out of shape.

As if her magic was a muscle that hadn’t been trained for too long, everything was tiring, fatiguing and anything she tried to accomplish was stopped midway. It was embarrassingly tedious.

Nothing floated right, her pencils wouldn’t move properly on the paper and apart from her Taser (because she had trained so hard to spark it just right), she could hardly activate anything without physical contact.

Oh boy, was she out of exercise.

New training regimes were put in place from then on.

To help with her focus, she started doing everything with her mind, even if it was much, much easier to simply walk to the fridge and get the damn orange juice with her hands.

Before she knew it, it was mid-December and she was still feeling out of it. She missed the freedom she had in her big home in Maine, where she didn’t need to check if the curtains were properly closed every time she had to even think using her powers.

But she wouldn’t risk it. Not now, nor possibly ever.

Meanwhile, her birds came and went.

She released them at night, under the watchful eyes of Pink, who could see startlingly well in the dark (and yes, Darcy was aware that lovebirds had no such capabilities, but she wasn’t going to investigate this). So far she had reached two more people.

Her fulmar still hadn’t returned from his trip to Southern America.

Who knew if he’d gotten lost or just couldn’t find his target?

Darcy yawned as her books zipped from the shelves to stack ordinately on her desk.

She had one paper due next week and she wasn’t going out until she was done with it.

***

Of course, by the time day two came around, her half-finished essay lay on the desk and she was staring into the void as she tried not to rage. Not too hard, at least.

Jane’s latest letter had arrived, and it was only her fear of being outed as a mutant that stopped her from bursting into her colleagues’ office (or the Dean’s) and smacking some sense into them.

Dr Foster had presented her theories to the academia, and they had dared laugh at her .

One by one, all of the young aspiring interns dropped from the program like flies with vinegar.

Then, the grants were shifted to ‘more promising’ pursuits.

Jane wrote her religiously, venting her frustrations to the penpal that came with the birds.

Darcy’s mood worsened every day.

She wasn’t one for pettiness, but she was not going to complain much if any of those idiots suddenly misplaced their car keys or had their affairs exposed.

But she could be gracious. A bit.

She’d give them a grace period before birds started dive bombing for professors’ wigs. The fact that she’d probably have to study ‘The Birds’ a bit more had nothing to do with this.

Jane’s predicament, though, had given her ideas on how exactly she could fill her six credits quota to graduate in a few months time (without being poked with needles by the Bio department).

There would have been no way a Political Science major would have been chosen for an astrophysics internship, but , her chances were going to grow exponentially if she didn’t have any kind of competition.

She would get her credits (and her friend close), Jane would get her intern, and if they moved far enough, she could even go for the vengeance path with a 100% solid alibi.

Her fulmar came back on the first night of December.

Unfortunately, he was empty handed.

“He says he didn’t find the man you were looking for.” Pink shook her head. “Says he probably missed him because the area was vast.”

Yeah, that made sense. Sending a single bird to look for a single man with only ‘well yeah he could be in Brazil’ had been a poor plan to begin with. She’d hoped it worked, but in hindsight, she wasn’t surprised it didn’t.

Of course, sending him back again with the same plan wasn’t feasible. Not because the bird wouldn't try, but because trying the very same thing over and over to see if it worked wasn’t a very smart move.

Darcy resolved to try again in the future, maybe with a faster bird that travelled in flocks. Huh, wonder where my geese are right now. Probably in Europe… They usually were.

She did, however, send the bird around anyway, just in case, with orders not to scan the entirety of South America, but to keep to the coast, where he was supposed to belong to anyways.

Worst case scenario, he’d come back in a year with no news.

Total, complete and unexpected freedom came a week later, when activists invaded the labs of a famous pharmaceutical research facility and freed a literal forty thousand domestic canaries and other variety of birds by releasing them into the streets.

As much as Darcy tried to be horrified, because those little pretties were going to die and starve during the winter and oh my God some people should have had a better plan before breaking and entering and condemning so many birds to death , she didn’t miss the fact that this accident allowed her to multiply her agency and influence over at least ten States for at least three years (for surely not every bird would die, and canary birds could reproduce fast ).

She purchased a ton of coloured paper, just in case.

She wasn’t going to write anyone else anytime soon, because college was hard and she had to graduate before she started crusading full time, but the possibility to send canaries without arousing suspicion was a boon she wasn’t going to waste.

Of course, it came to a point where she actually started sheltering the little birds.

In fact, she made a point to keep a window open and plenty of grains at hand and be very vocal about hosting a number of little critters in her apartment.

Glinda would hate her by the time she came back, but how could she say no? They were just so cute and tiny and fluffy.

Besides, Pink loved the company and the attention. Because she was bigger and smarter than the little fuzzies, she became the self-appointed leader of the ragtag clique stashed on Darcy’s bookshelves.

If only they stopped chewing on her yarn...

To whoever sent me this letter.

I apologize, but to my defense, I had no idea this was your bird. It’s…  a fascinating individual, I must say.

The pen is a simple fountain pen bought near Gulmira, Afghanistan.

Best wishes.

“A simple fountain pen my ass,” Darcy grumbled, annoyed. There was no way, no way, that ink was water based. Or oil based, for that matter.

It was worth a shot. She sighed dejectedly. If the pen was an original creation, the chances of its formula being shared were nihil. And even if she disregarded her moral principles and decided that permission wasn’t important, which it was and thank you very much , she couldn’t reverse-engineer it without the required equipment (which was probably somewhere around the biology department and she wasn’t stepping in there).

“Hey, Darcy!” chirped Pink from her hat-perch. “Shouldn’t you be studying?”

Crap.

She jumped so quickly the chair moved and she fell to the ground.

“Sorry.” Pink didn’t sound sorry.

“...You’re right.” Finals were in just about a week, and she really had no time to stress over hypothetical miraculous ink.

She chewed on her pen mechanically and lowered her head onto the textbooks again.

Political Science was much harder than she expected, and the second year hadn’t gotten any easier.

The young woman had tried not feeling called out every time her professors spoke about Mutants in Comparative Politics, and forced herself to ignore the disdain of some of her colleagues in Political Relations, but the more she delved into the matter the more she understood the enormity of the promise she’d made to her father.

But she loved the subject, and was not going to be discouraged. She was a woman on a mission there.

So she clicked on her pen and determinedly went back to studying.

P,

Sorry I’m venting it all on you, I know I’m a horrible friend, but no one understands!
Thank you for your cookies, they were delicious

My friend and mentor, Erik Selvig, is coming to help me with my research, since I went through ten interns in two months.

We’ll probably be moving on site soon.

Your bird actually waited five minutes before pecking my hand today. Progress!

Love, Jane.

Predictably, by the time Christmas rolled, Culver, the campus, and the nearby towns were all dappled with brightly coloured fluff balls that clashed with the white of the snow… And no one cared one bit anymore.

Once again, humans’ ability to simply adapt to almost anything won over the sense of wonder a yellow and red feather storm would have provoked just a month before.

Even Glinda, who had come back from her internship with newfound expectations for her life ( ‘Honestly, you should see how they don’t expect to pay you ever… the world is one fucked up place Darcy. Weirder than you imagine!’ ), had gotten used to birds spawning all over the place.

So much so she didn’t even blink when Darcy’s fulmar came back.

The white, powerful bird flapped aimlessly at the girl, then noticed that she wasn’t alone in the room. So it opened its beak and squawked. Loudly.

“There’s another bird on the windowsill, Lewis,” Glinda whined from the couch. “Can you please stop feeding them? It has to be against city regulations or something, right? Don’t feed the pigeons or something like that. Right???” She raised her eyebrows challengingly at Pink.

Darcy scoffed. “They’re not killing anyone.” But she got up and reached for the bird, careful not to touch it with her powers.

“Speaking of killing… Sometimes I wonder if I should give them rice and settle the matter myself.” Her roommate clicked her tongue.

Darcy gasped, clutching the bird tightly. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“...You’re right, I wouldn’t. I’m not a monster,” Glinda sniffed. “But keep them in your room, yeah?”

“Yeah, got it.” She nodded. She wasn’t going to open her letter in front of her very oblivious frenemy anyways.

Her fulmar was back.

Again.

And this time, it wasn’t empty-handed.

The bird recounted excitedly of its adventure, of how it had seen the man with the purple shirt walking on the beach and had followed him all over the tiny village of Bumbutt nowhere until it could safely transform itself into paper.

Of how it had taken over four tries to get the man to read the message.

But the man who could shift into a green Sasquatch had capitulated and written back.

Darcy suppressed a squeal of delight.

Neatly scribbled in a corner, were four neat words.

Is this a joke?

Chapter Text

Dear P,

I have a new intern!! I can’t tell you how excited I am, she’s not a Science undergrad and probably knows nothing about Astrophysics, but she seemed pretty excited to be started and she bakes. She bakes!! So exciting. Also, she doesn’t have a boyfriend so there will be no more finding the intern in the closet. That one time was enough, oh my God.

How are you doing? It started snowing here.

Wait... I think I should have started with that one instead.

Cheers, Jane.

Success, thy name is Darcy Lewis.

Try as she might, Darcy couldn’t shake the smug smile from her face every time she stared at the internship acceptance papers.

She did feel some pang of sadness whenever she thought of Jane, forced to accept a Political-Science undergrad because nobody else would come to her, and then resolved to be the best intern Dr Foster, astrophysicist, had ever known. Or at least, try to.

As luck would have it, her finals went as well as she could hope for, which meant whenever her internship with Jane was over, she wasn’t going back to Culver and graduate straight away.

Next step would be getting a job and finally, start making a difference.

Darcy needed to step up her bird game if she wanted to use her powers full time from then on.

...And start thinking about a safe house.

Or two.

Or three.

in hindsight, there was a lot of stuff she needed to streamline before she even thought about using her powers and not getting caught at the same time.

“...Pink, I think we need to start looking for another couple of contingency plans.”

Could money be fabricated with her powers?

The answer was… no.

Not that Darcy Lewis would have actually used the counterfeited currency, but after various experiments, it was pretty clear that duplicating stuff just wasn’t her thing. For now, at least.

She did not know if new powers could come to her with age.

She had been able to do everything she did now since she had been a kid, after all, she just hadn’t found the need to.

It needed more careful consideration.

For now, though, she was probably better off learning how to hack into the Pentagon or create some Crypto-currency or something like that. It would probably bear more immediate results.

That, if she managed to supersede her morals about it, of course.

But she was smart enough to realize the kind of change she wanted in the world needed money and influence, either or, possibly both, and while her studies were important and she was very proud to be able to graduate on time (Internship notwithstanding) her goals had been very short-sighted in what didn’t involve her magic.

Her birds were cool, her absolute ace in the hole, but that alone wasn’t going to fly in the adults’ world. ‘That isn’t going to fly at all’, she frowned. ‘The moment the government finds me, I’ll be as locked up as Melissa. Yeah, not going there.’

She needed her own power and influence.

And this was going to start now.

As soon as she gave Glinda the room keys and moved her boxes where UPS could pick them up in the morning.

If she was lucky, she would even score a hug with her. Eh... Probably not.

New Mexico was… hot.

The bus to town was a dingy old thing, and Puente Antiguo wasn’t much different, but Darcy’s excitement had reached new levels during the trip.

She couldn’t wait to see Jane for the first time.

She had researched of course, knew what she looked like (she might have spotted her once or twice while on Campus… or five… maybe more times) and they had talked on the phone for the internship because Jane had already moved on base and couldn’t host a proper interview, but it still didn’t dampen her euphoria.

She was going to meet one of her friends and help her out in a way that didn’t involve emergency cookies or scarves. Yes!

Pink was completely keyed into her mood, and was getting pretty excitable. The idea of not being able to freely speak didn’t amuse her too much, but she was always willing to play the part.

Darcy bounced off the bus, her luggage in her hands and Pink on her head, when a blonde guy, at least six feet tall with an air of somebody that would rather have teeth pulled than be here approached her.

“Darcy Lewis?” he said snootily, his eyes bouncing from the pink trolley to her clothes to the lovebird.

“Yes?” Who the heck was this guy, anyway? Because there was no way this was Doctor Selvig. Oh shit, maybe he was? He was Swedish, right? And they were, like, tall and blond, right?

“Come with me,” he sighed, and led her to a red car parked nearby.

“Who are you dude?” she stopped walking. “Sorry, but you don’t strike me as Doctor Selvig.”

The man almost recoiled, annoyed, “of co- I’m Donald Blake, I work at the hospital.” He sniffed. “Jane asked me to give you a lift, and I’m a man of word.”

Darcy gaped. The way, the utterly… confident way he said those words. Oh God, she already disliked him. She would go spare -- or kill this man, either or really -- if the car trip took longer than five minutes.

At that moment a van sped before them, honking a few times.

Its brakes screeched and, before the engine was off, a tiny figure was launching herself out of the driver’s seat.

“What are you doing here, Donald?!” The woman screamed at the top of her lungs.

“You said you needed me to pick her up, Jane,” the man rolled his eyes condescendingly. “I keep my word.”

“That counted while we were still together, idiot! I can’t believe-”

So… this was Jane.

Darcy and Pink watched, wide-eyed, as the woman tore into the longsuffering doctor about things that shouldn’t be public. The tiny woman screamed, waved and then launched a bag of clothes straight into the man, who lost his balance under the sudden weight.

“Are they going to fight?” whispered Pink, when it was clear they had been pretty much forgotten.

“I think they are already, Pink. Must be a recent breakup.” She cleared her throat, loudly. Jane Foster turned to her, with one last glare to Doctor Blake. “Yes?”

“Hi… Jane Foster?”

Jane blinked. “Yes! Of course! You must be Darcy, hi! I’m sorry I was late, I was just- No matter, I’m here now,” she pointedly remarked, “so we can go.”

The intern looked awkwardly at the doctor, who was rolling his eyes, and nodded. “Sure.”

‘Helping with something different than emergency cookies and scarves’ sounded excellent.

Unfortunately, the reality was much less glamorous.

In fact, her only job was to keep the plants watered and the human plant (she meant Jane) fed. Nothing else.

Darcy had feared her magic, or worse, her paper birds, would be found sooner rather than later (even Glinda was a tad suspicious and she’d lived with Darcy for years!), but that apparently wasn’t the case.

In fact, she could have paraded naked while talking to Pink that her boss wouldn’t have noticed.

Jane was content to happily ignore her lack of experience and her whole presence as long as she got her Pop Tarts. And no sleep. Or any kind of human contact.

It grated on Darcy something fierce.

Until one day it was enough. “Okay, bosslady, that is enough!”

Jane Foster looked up blearily from her workshop, her cheek smeared with ink and her hands almost black. “Huh?”

“When was the last time you slept more than a couple of hours, boss?” She waved a hand in front of the tiny woman, and watched as her boss barely kept up with it.

“What day is it?”

Darcy’s brain screeched to a halt. “Okay, no. No no no no. Bed. Now.”

She took Jane’s hands in hers and tried to lead her upstairs.

“I’m your boss!” Was the indignant squawk that followed.

“Not now. Now you need sleep. And a shower,” she sniffed the air. “Okay, no. Shower first, then sleep. I’ll call the diner and have some real food ready for when you wake up.” Groceries were a myth in the tiny gas station, as the astrophysicist and her absentee mentor lived on preservatives. She had to remedy to that too, and soon.

For now, though, she had to fix the mess that was this workstation. And what a mess it was. A glorious mess of papers and destroyed mysterious apparels.

She locked all the doors, cursing the glass panels she couldn’t cover with curtains or fabrics, and let her powers do the work.

The next day Jane Foster resembled a human being once again.

She staggered out of her room after twelve hours of sleep (‘I’m fine, I don’t need a nap’ my ass) and almost wolfed down the soup Izzy had sent them. For good measure, Darcy handed her a bread roll, since they were doing so well.

“I’m sorry I’ve been short with you, yesterday,” the woman said as she chewed on the bread slowly, “I had the worst week.”

“Don’t sweat it, boss, I get it.” Kind of.

“But today is a new day,” Jane had not heard her at all, maybe? “We need to start fixing the notes I got yesterday and start with the calculations. And I think I may have destroyed one of my machines while I was packing Donald.. I mean Doctor Blake’s stuff. So that needs repairing too-”

Darcy winced, “yeah, about that…”

Her pen pal slash boss put her into focus right away, “what about my data?”

“I may, or may not, I’m not saying anything here, have already collected your data..."

Jane nodded slowly and Darcy ploughed on, "but I have no idea where to go to fix your buddy?” If there was any hope at all, because the buddy didn’t look like much. Like, it was so broken they might just melt it and salvage the plastic parts.

A moment of silence was all the warning she got.

Despite her protests, Jane insisted they go immediately to assess the damage, the soup mournfully forgotten on the counter. ‘Lesson for the future’, Darcy thought, ‘never interrupt her while she’s eating’.

There was a horrified shriek, followed by the same stunned, pained silence from a few minutes ago.

Then a scramble of feet and Erik launched himself in the garage, not even glancing at the panicked Darcy. “What’s wrong?!”

“My baby! Destroyed!”

She sighed in depressed relief. Okay, that was her fault. The intern resigned herself to a rough scolding. She should have just left it to rot, instead of going in blind with volatile (and stupid) magic that couldn’t think for itself.

Dear Green Man in Purple shirt,

what’s the weather like in Brazil? Here it’s disgustingly cold.

You’d think living closer to the desert would make it warmer, and it did, at the start? But then winter came and kicked our ass and now I’m wearing three sweaters and it doesn’t feel warm enough.

Also, snow. What. the. Hell.

Have you ever studied inks? I’m fascinated by them. I even asked a friend about special ink but he wouldn't answer.

Love, P.

Dear P,

I don’t think I’ll be able to write much longer. I am becoming rather busy on a project, so busy that even my family in Gulmira might not see me for a while. I hope they’ll be safe.

Since I’ll be so busy, it would be unfair to tease you any longer about the craftsmanship of the ink you like so much. So, if you are so determined, I’m sure you’ll be able to find the components yourself, if given a big enough sample (which I have included). Before you ask, I believe giving the solution to whoever asks for it robs them of the best part.

Take care and pray for me,

Yinsen.

Chapter Text

Dear P,

ink? That is such a curious request, but it goes with the whole bird made of paper that is actually a letter. Did you know it’s biologically a bird until you touch it or it transforms? Your fulmar lost a feather and I had a friend examine it. It’s bird DNA.

I’ve heard of walnut inks? Does that help?

I was expecting something entirely different from this conversation.

Brazil is fine. I liked snow.

Man with the Purple Shirt (I go by Bruce)

“Darcy, I’m bored.”

“Yes, Pink.”

“I’m really bored.”

“I agree, Pink.”

“I’m super bored.”

“Pink, be silent!”

Everything stopped in the lab. Pink huffed, disgruntled, while Jane and Erik blinked owlishly at her.

Darcy had to give it to them, they’d unfortunately gotten more observant over the last month.

“Sorry, guys,” she shrugged, “Pink and I were having a ‘discussion’” she airquoted. “It was very enlightening.”

“I’m sure,” deadpanned Selvig, as impressed with that explaination as he was when he found out she was a Poli-Sci grad student. His acceptance was still a work in progress, give her a break.

She fought the urge to poke her tongue at him, a childish display she was certain would cement his idea that she was a desperate washout in need of credits, which okay, she was (desperate), but definitely not a washout. She could have done Sciencey things just fine, she just didn’t want to.

“Hey, Darcy?” Pink poked her head through the edge of her woollen pocket, whispering so quietly Darcy would have thought nothing of it.

“What?” she whispered irritably. She loved the bird, she did, but she needed to find some kind of enrichment for the creature or she was risking going completely spare.

“There’s one of yours coming back! Right behind us.”

Darcy tensed so much the screwdriver almost went through her hand. “Careful there, Darcy!” hissed Jane, who was watching her like a hawk now that she had her hands into her beloved machine’s entrails. “It’s a delicate process!”

“Yes, bosslady,” she gritted out, pretending to focus once again. For the last few days, since The Catastrophe (namely, the day Darcy discovered magic and technology really didn’t mix up well unless you knew how everything worked to a T), rebuilding everything from scratch had become so repetitive she was just abusing her muscle memory. Autopilot was a beautiful thing.

“It’s getting closer, Darcy!” the lovebird said urgently, her tiny neck craning to watch behind their shoulders.

“Darcy, for the love of God, focus!” Jane actually grabbed the screwdriver from her hands and waved it at her.

“Yes!”

“Right behind us-” “-Darcy!” “Let it res-”

“OKAY, EVERYBODY JUST SHUT UP!” she snapped. “I’m not a baby, Jane, I know what I’m doing. Yes, Doctor Selvig, I kind of know.” She wrenched the screwdriver from her grasp and jabbed into the dead thing. As she twisted the screw in place, the machine made a soft ‘bleeeep’ and miraculously started working again.

“Oh,” meeped Jane sheepishly and even Selvig seemed a tad more impressed.

“Also,” Darcy gritted out, her teeth grinding and her eyes narrow with annoyance, “my bird keeps saying ‘bird bird bird’ over and over, so I’m going to ask: is there a bird behind me?”

They both blinked stupidly at her, before Selvig actually looked and produced a dying animal sound.

“Well, I’ll be,” he grouced, “Jane, it’s your secret admirer.”

A wondrous thing happened right under Darcy’s eyes, then.

Jane’s head jerked up, her hands releasing the feverish hold she had on her beloved beast, and her face brightened. Pure, unadulterated joy shone on her face, as if they hadn’t just come from a 12 hours procedure that would put some surgeries to shame.

“It’s here!” she shouted delightedly, her creature forgotten in Darcy’s shaky grasp.

Fortunately for Jane, Darcy’s hold was more solid than people would give her credit for.

Unfortunately for Darcy, the machine was heavier than it looked, and she’d gotten distracted watching her friend transfigure at her letter. “Shit!”

“Darcy, watch out!” Selvig was at the intern’s side in a flash, and together they managed to stabilize the result of their efforts, and hopefully save Darcy’s toenail in the process.

“What the hell, bosslady!” Darcy complained, her hands on her hips. She was happy Jane was as excited as she’d hoped at the correspondence, really, it made the hoops she went through to deliver it very worth it, but still. Even Selvig was as exasperated as she was, and that was saying something.

“Huh? Oh, sorry, I’ve just been waiting for this for a long- You know what, guys? We’ve worked hard,” Jane’s smile was encouraging and hesitant, “why don’t we get the rest of the day off? You can get some early lunch.”

Darcy and Selvig stared at her incredulously.

“Are you quite okay, Jane?” Selvig tried hesitantly, but Jane’s attention was already on the bird, who had flopped awkwardly on the desk.

She was trying to hide it from them, Darcy realized with humor. Boss’s strategic positioning needed more work.

However, she couldn’t resist. “What’s that, boss?” she needled.

Jane’s eyes widened. “A bird. Nothing to worry about! Go away, go go!”

With one last look to her friend, Erik and Darcy left.

“So… what’s with the bird?”

At Darcy’s nonchalant words, Selvig stabbed the meatball she’d dropped on his plate with so much energy it split in the middle and the tomato-glazed half fell on his trousers. He didn’t notice.

“A spy, that’s what it is,” he huffed, and Darcy blinked owlishly.

“What?”

Selvig sighed. “I’m not serious, I don’t think. Jane-” he took a deep breath and Darcy took it as a sign to sit down and make herself comfortable. “You have to realize, Jane’s ideas, you must have noticed despite you being, well, no offense, you-”

Darcy frowned, because yes, she took very much offense, and he hastily retracted his words. “I mean, you must have noticed Jane’s theories are… well, eccentric, even for our field.”

“Jane’s ideas are good!” she defended loyally.

Selvig nodded, “Jane’s a good kid, yes, and her father, Dr Foster, was one of my best friends. My mentor, so to speak. But her theories, they never attract the ‘good’ kind of people, yes? Only quacks or big Men in Black thugs, let me tell you. It was just the same with Hank Pym, before he was disappeared.”

Darcy didn’t know who this Hank Pym was, but she needed to find out right away. Especially if the government liked disappearning people like him or Jane. On her head Pink’s little nails scraped her hair. She was thinking just the same.

“I almost had her convinced to give up, for her safety, with her brain she could have gotten a comfortable life just teaching. No reason to end up like her old man, yes? ‘Car accident’, pfft... And then, out of the blue, these paper birds start to appear, and they’re full of nice and kind words and Jane’s excited all over again!”

His eyes filled with tears, “I’ve been sticking around, you know, putting my name all over her work so that people will overlook this ‘pet project’ and yes maybe it’s just quackery, God knows I hope so. Thanks to these blasted birds.”

Darcy just sat there, her eyes wide, frozen in horror. She sucked in a breath, a more difficult task than she’d expected. She had no idea she was making this kind of waves. Jane’s first message had been so expectant and self-assured, the shouted “THE BRIDGE IS REAL” all over the paper, Darcy would have never imagined she was actually trying to convince herself.

She… she had made a difference, and for the life of her she couldn’t see if it was good or bad.

He cleared his throat loudly, noticing her discomfort. “Mind, I’m happy she’s happy. She’s the happiest I’ve ever seen her. But what do we really know about those birds?”

“...I don’t know?” she hesitated.

“Exactly!” he nodded, and it was clear that it had been a rethorical question. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Mutant discussions going on lately…?”

Apparently, her little knowledge of physics just had to transfer to everything. Her annoyance at Selvig came back with a vengeance. “Poli-Sci Major, yes. What about them?” So, they were going to have that kind of conversation.

“Right.” He seemed more uncomfortable. “That bird… that’s right up their alley, I think.”

Darcy’s eyes narrowed. “And what about that?”

“Mh?” His eyes widened in response, “oh, oh no you misunderstand. Heh, Jane can talk to all the Mutants. You can do that too, if you want. Marry a Mutant, they’re the future! We can only wish, really, most of them are the best people I’ve ever met. I have pictures, too! But,” and here he lowered his voice and Darcy instinctively leaned closer, “many of them have been captured and ‘convinced’ to work with the Government. Stuff to give you the nightmares. Some they get young.”

Darcy sucked in another quick breath, “you think the Government is keeping tabs on her.” It wasn’t it, of course, but she couldn’t exactly tell him without giving herself away.

Selvig nodded. “They did with my friend Pym, with Foster and recently with Banner. He was a genius, that one. And yet? Poofed. The last time I saw him he was packing his favourite purple shirt in a zip bag saying he’d been chosen for this amazing Avant Garde project with the Military. At first I still received updates, but then-” he shook his head, “we’ll be lucky to find his body in a ditch, somewhere. Too smart for his own good, that good, genuine man.”

They went back to eat, but they both knew the mood was completely wasted.

On her head, Pink shuffled until she was right beside her ear. “Darcy, do you think-?”

Darcy just nodded subtly. What were the chances that this Bruce and undercover purple shirt Bruce were one the same?

There was only one way to find out.

Dear Yinsen,

are you okay? You’ve been silent for almost two weeks, and for this I’m sending you a new, faster bird.

Please tell me you’re okay?

Anything will do.

Love, P.

Dear P,

I’m so happy to get one of your letters! My new Intern, Darcy, is very inexperienced but tries her best, she even fixed Eddy today, I’m so happy! She’s also a good cook. Erik doesn’t like her much yet, but she’ll grow on him, she’s the best intern I had so far.

And she’s so curious!

Thank you for the cookies, they’re delicious and I’m not sharing them with anyone.

Love you lots, Jane.

Dear Bruce, or Man in the Purple Shirt,

OH MY GOD, Am I talking to Bruce Banner there???? You’re like, a LEGEND, my boss raves about your work all the time, I’m just about so excited. You’ve got 7 PhDs and I’m struggling to pass my science classes!

It stopped snowing, so sorry I can’t give you some snow over post. Not that the bird would have been able to keep it cool all the way through Brazil.

Walnut ink? That’s… that’s like water based, right? Or you know some mineral based ones? Also, just what can you have examined right there? ... Could you do human DNA? Asking for a friend.

Hope you’re well, P.

Chapter Text

Tony Stark stared at the torn message in his hands for the millionth time in two weeks.

Yinsen had lied to him. He’d told Tony he had no family in Gulmira, a fact disproven by the fact that he’d met his wife, still desperately looking for him (and oh that had hurt. Looking into her eyes as he told her, wearing his Iron Man suit, that the man was dead, and he couldn’t even tell her most of the truth...).

And now this shit.

Whenever Tony met him again, he was going to slap him (and cry. And thank him, maybe.).

His hands went to his face again, and he sighed.

So.

He had a letter.

A torn letter.

A letter that Yinsen had said was very special, from somebody whom he cared about a lot, somebody also very important. According to the scientist, the sender was going to be just so important and had an amazing amount of potential (and Tony had no idea how the mysterious sender had even gotten a letter to Yinsen when he was in prison).

And Tony had to answer the letter. He just had to, Yinsen made him promise that.

Also, he had a flask of black sludge the good doctor had told him to keep at all costs and to never use, because there was no way to get more of it and could actually save lives. Yeah, right.

However, despite him not being attached to things, he wasn’t going to back on this. The vial had been put in his safe, pending some results he had JARVIS run. Just because he wanted to actually understand what the hell he had in his house.

The small pieces were an absolute disaster, he could barely make out the shapes of it, but then again the thing had taken a lot of bullets. Tony was actually stupefied at the resilience of the ink, which glittered without a smudge over the almost destroyed paper.

“Hey, J,” he started, “do we have some glue?”

“...I’ll notify Miss Potts, sir.”

So, that was a thing now. He was actually doing it.

Tony Stark, repairer of little leaflets.

“Tony, oh my God, don't do that! We need to reconstruct the message bef- What are you doing?!”

The stick glue was removed from his hands with such a speed he still had the phantom feeling in his fingers and he had to blink.

“Pepper, come on! It’s just glue!”

His friend gave him one last, exasperated eye roll before she went back to their new puzzle game aka ‘find the hidden message!’. He was honestly thrilled, despite not having touched the project at all.

“No, you’re not touching it. Also, you should be resting, you just almost died and then did it again and you’ve barely made it. Do I need to chain you to the bed? Lord knows I will.”

Okay, he could give her that.

He gingerly sat back on the couch and pretended he wasn’t one bit interested in Pepper’s magic collage skills.

After ten minutes of doing just that though, he got decidedly… well, he wouldn’t say bored. He was. Very bored.

“How’s it going?” he asked nonchalantly, side-eyeing the woman who was now sitting on the carpet, her tongue poking slightly out in concentration.

“Slowly, Tony,” Pepper huffed. “This scrap of paper has seen better days.”

“Don’t I know it.” Afghanistan had done a number on them all.

“Sir, the results on the contents of the flask are ready.”

Tony blinked.

Did he fall asleep?

He stretched and noticed with dismay that he had indeed fallen asleep.

It was already dark out.

“JARVIS, Pepper?” he asked.

“Miss Potts is getting some documents from your office, sir. She said she wanted to get some work done while you slept.”

He huffed, as if he never let her work when he was awake. He did, however, accept that she wasn’t going to let him poke around her for a while, and went for his room, ready to open the safe and eventually destroy its contents.

“Okay, J, hit me. What kind of horrible weapon are we hosting?”

“It seems to be a mixture of resins, alcohol, pigments, carbon, and a binding agent made from holly and powdered silver, sir.”

“Okay. Wait, what? You’re telling me in my safe I have a-”

“A little bottle of ink, sir.” JARVIS was almost too cheerful. “A rather unique ink, if I may.”

Unbelievable.

All this mess for a bottle of ink.

Tony sighed. Trust Yinsen to confuse him even more. Was this actually some sort of moral lesson? Was there some mystical meaning he was missing?

He scratched his head, he did that a lot recently.

“Well, we’ll leave it there for the moment, it’s just ink.”

“Indeed,sir.”

Why did he even think the good doctor would have given him something dangerous, anyway.

“Hey, J, did Pepper give up on her collage?”

“No, sir, it’s on the table, sir.”

“Riiiiiight.” He had noticed that.

“Dear Yinsen, are you okay? You’ve been silent for almost two weeks, and for this I’m sending you a new, faster bird. Please tell me you’re okay? Anything will do. Love, P.”

Oh, shit.

The newly reformed letter looked much better than Tony had imagined a glued together scap could look like. He could barely make out the old tear lines, if there were any left. Pepper had to be some kind of genius of tape-together. Huh.

But the words were the real problem. Now that was one hell of a pickle.

On the one hand, Tony really didn’t want to have another ‘your important person is dead, sorry’ with somebody, on the other hand he had promised to Yinsen that he would respond.

And there wasn’t a return address of any kind! Hell, he’d paid to have a name.

“What the hell, Yinsen,” he sighed.

He stared at the letter for he didn’t know how long, not daring to touch it as if it could bite him, which was absurd, right?

He belatedly realized the windows were opening and that it was day and how did that happen? Did Pepper even go home?!

“Well, okay, fine. Letter coming up.”

But he had barely touched the paper, that it escaped his grasp, shuddered, and a honest to God live white falcon was screeching at him with the angriest hissy fit.

Tony instinctively covered his head and dropped to the ground. The awful beast didn’t wait a second longer, and with another ear-splitting screech launched itself out of the window into the open air.

Tony scrambled to his feet and stared incredulously at the scene.

“You saw that too, didn’t you, JARVIS?”

Fuck him, he needed proof of this before he told Pepper.

Chapter Text

P,

Yes, as much as I would like to say no, I am that Bruce Banner. Not something I’m proud of, lately, I’m afraid. I’m flattered your boss thinks so highly of me, but it really is no big deal.

Snow is but a mirage now, but thanks for thinking about me.

As far as I know, walnut ink is water-based, but I have asked around, and maybe I’ll be able to find you something more… exotic.

DNA?! What? That sounds vague. And ominous. I’m not that kind of Doctor, you know that, right? Also, if I even knew how to make it work I would need… so much more equipment to do that, what would I even be looking for?! If you asked what you wanted from me exactly… Maybe?

If I could talk about it with my colleagues, possibly?

Bruce

Researching Hank Pym and Dr Foster, Senior, in the middle of wolf-ass, nowhere (Puente Antiguo, New Mexico), was harder than Darcy had thought. The age of the internet had not been kind to the man, whose work seemed to have avoided digitalization entirely. “The government, probably,” had nodded Pink, after five whole days of nothing, cursed nothing.

Darcy had to agree. It was apparent that whoever Pym had rubbed the wrong way had done their best to erase every single mention of Hank Pym from the Internet. She wondered if a paper trail could be found somewhere, in a dusty library, forgotten by most people. Frustrated, she slammed the laptop closed. Dr Pym was going to be a mystery to be solved another day.

Selvig had told her, uncomfortable people were conveniently cancelled by the entire planet as if they had never existed. Oh, there were Wikipedia pages with a perfectly summarized life and some achievements, but nothing that could scream ‘well, this is revolutionary’. The only interesting mention was a military base in the seventies.

She glanced at Jane.

Was that the destiny waiting for her, in the… somewhat plausible case her theories were correct? Dr Foster, three lines of a Wikipedia page with no source, and a simple record of two academic papers?

She shook her head. She wasn’t going to think about that. Not when Jane was just so happy to have somebody in her corner.

She had noticed how much Jane had livened up since receiving P’s letter, how she smiled more, how she had started to eat more and more regularly, despite not sharing her stash of cookies (which were the last batch Darcy had… and that could become a problem).

She was not going to be the one breaking all of her dreams.

So, she decided, she was still going to become the best assistant and intern, and meanwhile find a way to keep her friend safe.

“You have a long list, Darcy,” warned Pink, confused. “Keeping Jane safe doesn’t even sound like a task you can add to a list?”

It was true. Her evergrowing to-do list was nowhere near the ‘doable’ right now, and pretty vague.

She sighed. “Then what’s next on the list, Pink?”

The little lovebird thought about it for a while. “...Foster Senior?”

“-Right.”

“Darcy, I absolutely need you to record the last batch of readings we got” Jane was talking excitedly over Selvig’s mutterings. “Look at all this!” She gestured to the papers filled to the brim with scribbled notes. “It’s a miracle, I say! The best readings since we’ve come here!”

Darcy dutifully noted down the pages to copy. “Are you sure, boss-lady? Everything?” “Why yes, yes!” Jane was nodding along, passing her yet more paper. “And this, too!” Darcy gaped. “Boss-lady, that’ll take hours to do!”

That seemed to shake the woman a little. “Well, yes…” she admitted sheepishly. “But can you blame me? Zilch for weeks, and then this! And just when we’re ready with the new spectrometer! It’s amazing!”

Darcy sighed and resigned herself to another sleepless night. One of the many, recently.

Dr Foster, senior’s magnum opus, according to what was available to her meagre sources, had turned out to be a complete compendium of stars and old data about star charts, something that baffled Darcy so much that she had to ask Selvig about that. The man had bumbled and complained, but in the end, told her that no, that was hardly what his research had been about and that she should “stop asking this kind of question for Christ’s sake, I told you in confidence!” In fact, he’d said it with such vehemence that for now, Darcy was content to just let him stew and not bother him anymore.

As such, Darcy had stopped searching for apparently deadly information and was busying her time with testing the limits of her powers with technology.

Days of secret training turned into weeks, and while the scientists slept, Darcy Lewis kept living her secret second life.

Her birds came in at night, or when Jane and Selvig slept, and left by the time they awoke, with none the wiser.

Yinsen’s lack of communication was worrying her terribly, but short of sending him dozens of birds, she didn’t know what to do. Her last bird hadn’t come back, and it had been weeks now.

A bit more forthcoming had been Bruce, and in her head, she’d started to seriously consider sending him some of her DNA. She was pretty sure she was a Mutant, and as far as she’d read, Mutants had some sort of Gene that was actually noticeable. She wasn’t particularly keen on exposing herself so much, but she had waited long enough, and it was time to start searching for her answers.

She penned a quick letter to Bruce, explaining briefly how she had a ‘friend’ who needed help, which was as transparent as spring water, but she didn’t really care. The man was basically a certified genius, and it certainly didn’t take one to notice that animated paper wasn’t exactly your garden variety paper. She let the fulmar go, with clear instructions to not leave the man alone for one second and report back to her if he were to be in danger or try to do something overly stupid. She’d met scientists now, she knew what brand of stupid she could expect from them.

The bird nodded once to her, twice to Pink, and left in the dark of the night.

“Safe travels!” thrilled Pink, following him with her little round eyes.

Behind Darcy, Jane snored softly and turned in her sleep, moving her head on the papers the intern had just started copying.

“We should get her in a bed, Pink,” sighed the woman.

Jane and Erik kept the weirdest sleep and work patterns she’d ever seen, but that worked splendidly for her. They worked hard, for hours on end, followed by a very long crash that usually happened within the forty-ninth hour of non-stop buzzing around their not-very aptly named instruments.

And that left her, technically alone, in a house with a lot of interesting new shit to test.

Skittish about trying her hand at one of the delicate ones, mindful of the carnage that she’d caused back when she thought she could just use her power at will without causing an explosion, she was now trying to move the sturdiest apparels around.

A task that left… much to be desired.

“More, Darcy, you’re not moving it at all!” complained her lovebird.

“I know, PInk!” she gritted her teeth, straining to caaarefully move the items and turning them on without using her hands. “It’s just not working!”

“Focus!” Pink encouraged her.

“I am focusing!” snapped the girl.

As soon as she said that, ‘Carl the Third’, a Jane Foster invention, shuddered, rose three feet from the ground, slammed back down and turned on, beeping cheerfully.

Pink squawked and hid.

“NO!” howled Darcy, wincing at the loudness of her voice. If Carl was broken in any way, Jane was going to fry her and serve her up to eat.

She scrambled to Carl’s side, checking for any damage, but found none. “Is… is the thing alright?” asked Pink.

“It looks like it,” nodded Darcy, blinking, “I did not see that one coming, Holy shit, it worked!”

“Yay!” cheered the bird. “...How did you do that without destroying the machine?”

Darcy blinked again. “Hell if I know Pink. How much time do we have before they wake up?”

Pink turned to look at the sleeping scientists. They snored back. She giggled. “At least another couple hours. But you still have to copy all that data…”

“Right.” She nodded. “Let’s get back to work then.”

Of course, things never stay the same, and as much as Darcy wanted to just lay the blame on the weather, the fact was that, well, she got careless.

In the weeks she’d spent at the Gas Station with Jane and Selvig, who was still not very happy about her but was slowly starting to accept the fact that she was sticking around, she’d gotten pretty used to be left to her own devices and to have her co-workers sleep like the snoozy rocks they were once they decided it was time to rest their eyes a little.

She had willfully ignored the whispers of the residents of Puente Antiguo, that complained about an unprecedented flock of wild birds the size of Thanksgiving turkeys just dancing around the town at the weirdest time, often waking the villagers up with their insistent screeching.

She had also ignored Jane’s increasingly suspicious looks at every letter she received, her eyes often wandering towards the platter of cookies she made sure to bake every day, since it was just about the only thing she could cook and get them to actually eat.

But by then, she had started making some real progress towards honing her powers around Jane’s equipment, to the point of finally being able to turn them on and off without almost looking at them, and she couldn’t very well stop now, could she?

And that, was when Jane noticed.

“To the left, Darcy, to the left!” Pink was cheering sotto voce, squeaking joyously every time the spectrometer zoomed across the room. “Make it chase the table!”

“You are such a child,” scoffed Darcy. However, on cue, the table started flip-flopping awkwardly on the floor, like a badly behaved but very stiff dog.

Pink puffed out at that, but was quickly appeased by the show, with the spectrometer now firmly on the ground, shuffling around like it meant to clean the whole floor by covering every corner of the room.

CRASH.

A loud noise behind her back made both of them jump out of their skin.

Without turning around, Pink slinked back into Darcy’s hat and balled up, as tiny as she could.

Darcy, however, had no such opportunity.

Jane was standing behind her, her hair mussed by sleeping in her usual uncomfortable position, but her eyes were wide open, her mouth agape, and the remainders of her newest inventions were now on the floor, possibly with no hope of restoration.

“...Boss lady?”

Jane gaped, opening and closing her mouth with a snap. “What- what is going on?!”

After being asked to explain for the third time, Darcy’s desire to bolt had been replaced by irritation. “I told you, Boss-lady, I don’t know!” She had no scientific explanation to what she did, she had no concrete idea of how she did it, unless you counted the ‘focus very very hard until you’re ready to incinerate everything with your frustrations’. Things just… happened! All around her, and with some degree of control on her part, but it was mostly her winging it and hoping it worked out.

“It’s also what I’m actually trying to find out,” she grumbled despondently.

Jane didn’t seem to care. In fact, she looked a bit hurt. “I can’t believe you hid this from us,” she said.

Darcy arched one eyebrow. “Yeah? Jane, I’ve known you for a couple of months, barely! I didn’t tell my own mother!”

Jane had the decency to look sheepish at that. “Still, you can trust me!”

“After everything that’s happening to Mutants all around the world? Yeah, no. Do you know what happens to people like me, Jane? We usually end up in Government Endorsed Institutes or whatever, ready to be tested on or used at will. Hell, ask Selvig if you don’t believe me! With all he’s been saying about Government Issued Spies, I’m surprised I haven’t been vetted with blood scans, what with being a mere Poli-Sci major who should have no interest whatsoever in this field!”

“Erik wouldn’t do that!” Jane rolled her eyes. “Besides, who would even send spies to get my research? Nobody likes it, according to esteemed peers and colleagues.”

“Well, somebody does, or we wouldn’t be here… right?” Jane had to have gotten those funds from somewhere, right?

Jane shook her head. “Erik and I are funding this thing completely, Culver barely covered the basic expenses. Also, he’s doing it as a personal favour to me, or he’d be back at teaching. Still! I can’t believe I didn’t notice anything!”

“To… to be fair, Jane,” said Darcy, “you and Erik are very easily distracted.”

The astrophysicist blushed. “A bit, maybe! But still! Hovering furniture with just your mind, in my lab, without me noticing at all!” She eyed the little ball that was Pink. “And I haven’t forgotten that you were talking waaay more fluently than you should, Pink. If Pink is even your name.” Her eyes widened. “Is she…?” Darcy frowned. “She’s a bird.”

Jane deflated a little, who knew where her mind had taken her. “Oh, okay. I just thought… she’s very intelligent, right?”

“She’s always been smart,” said Darcy, suddenly cagey. Her powers were one thing, but Jane hadn’t spotted her other, bigger, feathered secrets and she wasn’t about to spill her guts about that.

“More than smart,” sniffed Jane. She took another long look at Pink, before, apparently, deciding that she had bigger fish to fry. “But no matter. So, what else can you do? Can you copy my notes?”

“...By hand, sure.” Honestly, her powers weren’t that spectacular, but Jane seemed to think otherwise.

Indeed, Jane was fascinated by the floating cups of coffee she could have delivered to her while she worked, or by the papers she needed to be in her hands right away. That, and staring at Darcy’s lovebird as if she was another great puzzle with the secrets of the Universe hidden inside. She took being let in on the secret very seriously though, so seriously that she’d agreed to cover the windows of the lab, if Darcy stayed.

Not that Darcy had anywhere else to be, what with needing those 6 credits to actually graduate and her self-imposed mission to be actually helpful to Jane.

For now, though, another tentative balance had been achieved with Pop-Tarts and drinks, and Darcy was loath to agitate the waters again.

Which was why, indeed, Yinsen’s bird came back that night, broken and hurt.

Dear whoever got Yinsen’s letter, Who are you? Are you safe? Is Yinsen dead? Please respond! P.