Work Text:
On a stormy desert night, a roaring giant of a man turned to Darcy Lewis and she tasered him in the chest.
She didn’t hesitate, wince, or apologize.
If you don’t want to get electrocuted by a 5’5” girl, don’t charge at her on a dark and stormy night. Dangerous things come in small packages.
You’d think Loki’s brother would know that—but, ah, yes, back then Thor still had a lot to learn.
“A lot of students come in here looking for their purpose,” said the university guidance counselor, leaning forward. “And it’s my job to help.”
Darcy squinted suspiciously across the table. "You’re a romantic, aren’t you?"
The woman blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just looking for something to get me by,” said Darcy.
The counselor’s glasses were square, with chains. She was young, with big eyes and hope for Darcy’s soul. “And that’s Poli Sci?”
Darcy grinned wide. “I like arguing.” She shrugged. “They try to sell it to us, universities do, movies, whatever,” she said. “Purpose. One day you’re going to wake up and it will slam you in the face—your calling! Your plotline!" She made a face. With two brothers to practice on, Darcy made wonderful faces. "Careers are things you do, not things you are.”
They filled out paperwork and class schedules, Darcy tossing cheerful barbs at the woman’s idealism as they went. When she picked up her bag and headed to the door, the counselor called after her.
"Everyone has something to fall in love with, Miss Lewis. You'll find yours."
Darcy twiddled her fingers behind her. “People don’t have passions, they have lives.”
Darcy was mostly right.
After all, Jane Foster wasn’t a person, exactly, so much as a weather vane in the body of a frazzled young woman.
Darcy’s Physics 1 ("physics for poets") TA had gotten an academic crush on her. "You have an odd way of looking at things," he had told her brightly after class, meaning it as a compliment. "Have you ever considered a scientific major?" The next semester she found a forwarded email in her inbox.
Internship, astrophysics, six units. Room and board provided. Puente Antiguo, New Mexico.
“Old bridge,” Darcy translated. “Huh—didn’t think there’d be a river in the middle of a desert.”
(There wasn’t).
(Unless you counted the Milky Way, and Jane might, come to that).
Darcy looked at the black mold climbing from the far corner of her apartment to her windowsill. She clicked on the attached file of the application and started filling it in.
Two weeks later, Darcy touched down in New Mexico and went out into the tiny airport’s parking lot to look for an RV.
Darcy had worried about finding her new boss among the masses of suburban 2.5 kid families flocking south to vacation in the warm Walmart parking lots, with pit stops at the Grand Canyon, but she needn’t have worried. Puente Antiguo was not the part of the southwest where people went to vacation.
The slight woman in flannel who sat at the wheel of the badly air conditioned vehicle did not know she was pretty. Darcy wondered if she should tell her. “I’m Jane,” the woman said brightly, offering a hand, and Darcy assumed she meant Dr. Jane Foster.
“This looks like the kind of thing people hunt aliens out of,” Darcy said, hopping into the passenger seat. She had to fit her bags in among equipment and file boxes. “Do you have any tin caps?”
“Political science,” said Jane tentatively, trying for friendly. “Do you use the, um, empirical method much?”
“We used the argumentative pretty often. Ever seen two presidential wannabes butt heads?” She leaned closer and confided, “No one in my class is getting past town council, though, don’t worry.”
Clearly, they were off to a great start.
Oh no, thought Darcy when they reached her lab. I found a live one.
Instruments and equipment were unpacked—a bit of shambles and covered in duct tape, but out and blinking and live. Piled in the corner were half-opened boxes of clothes and dishes. From the crumpled blankets, it seemed Dr. Foster had been sleeping on the couch.
“I didn’t have time to—this chaotic behavior kicked up around 2 a.m. last night and—”
It took Darcy a moment to realize that the “chaotic behavior” was the universe’s, and it wasn’t that Jane had gone out into the undoubtedly heavy party scene of Puente Antiguo last night.
Darcy popped her gum and followed Foster around the place. She put her nose in every cabinet of the kitchen and then made the beds. She had slept on the ground enough times, on backpacking trips with her dad or at friends’ after parties, to not want to repeat the experience any more than she had to.
When Darcy woke up the next morning, she explored. Donald Blake's name was written on the tags of men's sweaters left throughout the house. Jane gave her some intern tasks too, and Darcy puttered through them, her eyes drifting to the unknown lines of this stark, quiet desert town.
Between beats of her music, over bleary coffee in the morning and the sprawl of her days, Darcy learned Jane's edges: PhD at MIT, so she knew what snow was. Jane left her car unlocked when she went to the grocery store and it flabbergasted Darcy, who had not grown up in a nice little suburb. There was a not-so-long-ago ex named Don, from the number of his old sweaters that were scattered in Jane’s luggage. Jane didn't seem to miss him so much as she seemed to occasionally be surprised to find him not there.
Darcy adjusted her opinion as she went. Jane did know she was pretty. She was just tired of people looking at her.
Darcy looked, but she looked at everything, and no one ever seemed to notice.
“You’re really smart, right?” she asked Jane once.
“Intelligence is very relative,” said Jane. It came out a little garbled; she had three screws held in her mouth while she carefully jiggled a fourth into place.
“What’s the point?” said Darcy.
“Well, this will take readings from the—”
“No, I mean—people keep talking about mattering.” She had gotten an email from that career counselor. She seemed to have taken a liking to her.
There were a couple clicks and pop from Jane’s corner of the room. Darcy went back to reading, thinking Jane wouldn’t answer, and flipped through a glossy magazine she’d picked up from the tiny local grocery while she scrolled through Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on her phone.
“You add a little more chaos to the world,” said Jane, once she’d put out the small fire she’d started on her desk. Darcy looked up. “The laws of thermodynamics—in a closed system, entropy always increases. You are a process, Darcy. You leave a little more chaos in the universe."
"I bring us a little bit closer to the heat death of the universe? That’s such a rewarding thought."
"We build things, right? Humanity. We take rock and make buildings, turn wheat into triple decker cakes. Plants turn sunlight into green growth. We turn carrots into strong bodies. We take boxes and make them cold—in our immediate sphere, we make things a little more orderly. We fight entropy. But if you move your sphere a little farther out and farther out—entropy always increases, on the grand scale. We can make a little order in our lives, but it doesn’t change the universe."
"Is that supposed to be cheering?"
Jane blinked. "Neither? It’s just true. It just is."
“You don’t have very many existential crises, do you?” Darcy waved a hand. “Don’t worry, you’re not missing much.”
Dr. Erik Selvig, when he arrived, was stuffy but obviously paternally enamored of Jane. He didn’t have the generous mind of Darcy’s favorite physics TA—when he met Darcy and her odd mind, he saw scientific illiteracy, not potential. Darcy grinned at him, one ear bud dangling, and popped a bubble of gum the way she had used to in school when she was trying for a detention.
Thor came next: out of the sky like a big Norse rock. He was more like a boulder than a lightning strike in those days.
There was something very simple about him. They put Thor in the mysterious Don’s old sweaters and took him out to pancakes. Darcy thought it was fitting repayment for two hits with a car and one with a taser, but she wasn’t paying, of course.
She snapped a picture of Thor's pancake smile. She was ready, if Jane rolled her eyes at her, to grin sweetly back and say, “Look, I’m collecting data. How science of me!” Darcy was the first to notice everything, except of course noticing that. No one noticed Darcy noticing.
Darcy noticed the storm out on the desert. She had seen Thor’s silhouette in their images of it before anyone else.
Jane was looking at instrument readings and storm footage, but Darcy was looking at Thor's abs. Quite aesthetically pleasing—but, also, what was a hobo doing that ripped? Darcy asked the important questions: how could you eat a whole box of Poptarts and still be hungry?
In London, she saw the equipment beeping away news of a new storm. Darcy saw the flocks of birds disappear outside the ward. She saw Jane’s heart breaking.
In Asgard, she saw the quirk of humor in Sif’s cheek, something no one had looked for since Loki, since Lorelei.
But that was still to come.
For now, there was breaking into SHIELD bases and rescuing puppies from destructing towns; there were big metal monsters and a few Renaissance-Faire warriors to stop them. Thor offered his life for theirs and Darcy stared. She'd read fairy tales, sure, but she'd always thought they were lying about the knights in shining armor.
(What had her big brother been, though, if not for that?)
Thor lay bleeding out in New Mexico dust and Darcy thought he's not supposed to be that still, that's not what he's for. Storms aren't meant to be buried in the ground, come on, come on, you're wind and lightning, get up!
He did.
His warrior friends cheered joy and Jane wept it; Darcy stared and shook. That was not the most desperate her prayers had ever been. Joy tried to trickle in her stomach, but it quailed against all the other griefs she hadn't been able to wash away with begged-for miracles.
Thor left, and Darcy tried not to think about her brother getting on the bus to boot camp. She patted Jane's shoulder, teased her about the kiss, and made her a milkshake.
SHIELD offered Dr. Foster funding for her continued research, enough for not just Darcy but Erik Selvig to stay on as well. Darcy stumbled over SHIELD agents when she got up to make coffee in the morning, but having enough funding to fix the RV's air conditioning might have been worth it.
Darcy’s dad had taken her out orienteering as a kid: backpacks and ball caps, a knife on her belt, handymedown hiking boots on her feet and a compass in hand.
“It points to the very top of the world,” he’d told her of the needle. (Years later Jane talked about the difference between the north pole and magnetic north, waving hands with energy that made Darcy wonder if Jane's beloved gravity held her less to the ground than other people).
Darcy and her father marched out, up and down ridges, made little marks on their tattered maps, squinted at their compass faces and made it back to the car before dark. Darcy napped in the passenger seat, aching and dirty, and didn't open her eyes until they bumped by the chain fenced yards of home.
Her mother read her fairy stories and took her fishing. Darcy spent most of her childhood very tan, splitting weekends between hikes with pop and fishing with mom.
Her mother hated feeling lost and her father couldn’t stand to sit still that long. They didn’t share hobbies.
Darcy thought her father had just never had his line break on a big, wily old fish and then had to watch him get away. Her mother had never gotten so lost that she found something—a clearing, a cliff, a wild twisted tree climbed high with curling vines—and felt gloriously alone in the universe.
Darcy was the middle of three. Her younger brother was in high school and wore his pants too loose. Her older brother had joined the armed forces and he had not come home.
They said that weird sometimes. "He came home in a box," or "on the wings of angels" or—but he hadn't. He wasn't here. He hadn't come home, that was the frustrating tragedy of it all. A pine box had come home. He hadn’t.
Darcy loved her parents, her father’s careful plans and her mother’s productive patience, but she could not be them. Darcy had stopped being able to sit still sometime during the second hour of her older brother’s funeral. For the rest of her life she twitched whenever the world tried to make her be still.
She had been fifteen. A flag had been folded over her brother’s coffin and she had gripped the edges of her seat with white knuckles.
That was not what flags were for. They were announcements, bright colors, flapping noises. They were for ruckus and wind, for hanging complacently on quiet spring mornings.
They weren’t meant to go into the ground.
Her brother wasn’t meant to be this still, this silent, this gone.
Darcy had twitched through the service, twitched through shaken hands and perfumed cheek kisses from unknown aunts, and then she had disappeared. Darcy charged off in her black jeans and nice black blouse and scuffed black sneakers.
When she came back, her little brother was sitting on the couch, cold hot cocoa in his hands. She nuked the cocoa and set up Donkey Kong Jr. They spent three hours failing to beat their brother’s best scores.
When the experiments in New Mexico dried up, SHIELD moved them to any place their contacts or Jane’s found for them. They went to New York, where Darcy was very busy yanking Jane out of the way of taxis.
Next: a rural province in China with a grumpy SHIELD protective detail and a sharply professional translator (Darcy had a bit of a crush on her).
Then Alaska, where Darcy made penguin jokes at their suits, who had learned to ignore her.
“Wrong continent,” said Jane.
“Humor knows no geographic lines,” Darcy said, with her nose in the air. She carried an extra pair of gloves in her purse for when Jane forgot hers, or deemed frostbite less important than science.
San Francisco, where the streets climbed up to the skies and Jane looked up and up and up. Darcy signed up for online classes and kept working on her degree.
Uganda, Kazakhstan, Brussels, they hit every continent except Antarctica. Darcy was a little disappointed about that. It would have been nice to have a full set.
They went to some hollow in the Australia, sixteen hours from Sydney, which made Darcy long loudly for the relative civilization of New Mexico. Jane's frozen grapes ran out around hour thirteen. Darcy complained loudly, but when they got there, after they'd set up their rudimentary camp and night had fallen, Darcy climbed up onto the roof of the RV and breathed the dark in.
Jane would have known each of the stars' names (okay, maybe not every one). The night sky was blazing with them, this far from city lights, gleaming points and milky splashes of light. Jane would have known all their names and all their secrets, but Darcy lay back and painted pictures in their shining shapes, painted her own secrets into them.
They say you'll have stories to tell if you only do something. Well, Darcy had stories to tell and no interest in telling them. That was not why she was here. She didn't wander off into the streets of that little mountain village in Greece, in Japan, in Chile, and poke her nose into every corner, and bother the locals who looked like they wanted bothering, because she wanted to tell someone a story someday.
She was breathing. She was moving. She was just looking for somewhere to be. This was about her.
"I want to matter," her brother had said before he’d left for service. "Do something that means something." Grinning, he had added, "And they’ll pay for college, so."
We can have a little order in our lives, but it doesn’t change the universe.
So then what does our little bit of order matter at all?
Their brother had bought them Christmas presents before he shipped out, so weeks after the funeral their mother found precisely wrapped gifts in the back of his closet. She paced the house and their father, who hated being still, didn't move from his armchair until dark.
Darcy took the gift with her name on it and disappeared. She didn't open it until February. He had gotten her a shining new compass to replace her battered handmedown.
It took almost a year for Jane to cry over Thor. Til then she had been busy chasing phenomena and building theories. Jane was used to long, taxing, fruitless stretches of work with only the promise of unraveling the secrets of the universe driving her on.
But when you’re chasing a lightning storm and it doesn’t show up where you expect, you recheck your hypotheses and your calculations.
When you’re chasing a lightning storm who likes coffee and might love you, and he doesn’t come back, you recheck what you think you know about him:
Does he keep his promises?
Is he still breathing?
Darcy had spent the fall of her fourteenth year crying over a boy with big ears and a good smile. She patted Jane awkwardly on the back. She went out and bought boxes of tissues, ice cream, and felt like a chick flick’s best girl friend. Hesitating at the register line, she made a quick shuffling sprint back and grabbed a bag of green grapes.
It was stupidly cold, not the season for frozen fruit, but Darcy was a sentimental gal.
The emails started coming—Miss Lewis, your registration period for the next school year has passed. Please contact Ms. Shure to petition for late registration.
Letters came, solid, hard copies: those words written out on paper. It made them feel more real somehow. Darcy dropped them in the trash without looking at them and tried not to think about it.
Emails came, more urgent and more dismissive. A few personally-penned ones showed up as the final deadlines loomed closer, from the counselor who’d taken a liking to her.
Miss Lewis, I noticed you haven’t registered yet. If it’s a tuition issue, give me a holler and I can pull some work study strings...
Darcy, I’m not sure you got my first message…
Darcy, are you okay?
At 3 a.m. (in the time zone on the coast of Venezuela), Darcy typed out a short lie without waiting to regret it. I fell in love with astrophysics, she said. Dr. Foster offered to keep me on.
Darcy had not fallen in love with astrophysics. Dr. Foster wasn’t keeping her on, Jane was.
Might as well tell the counselor the fairy story she wanted to hear, though.
Darcy made breakfast in the morning and pestered Jane, who was reading the night’s data and making unintelligible noises about it, until she ate it. Around noon, Darcy’s phone burbled contentedly.
I’m proud of you. You found your calling.
Darcy was proud of herself too, but she had slightly different reasons for it.
They kept moving. They kept coming up empty. Darcy wrote poetry and burned it. She scrawled words in the soapsuds of dishwater and then washed it away. When Darcy sang in the shower she didn't care who heard those warbling voices, but these words were hers.
Jane told her once about writing out lists of why her parents divorced and burning the papers. Darcy felt a sudden spark of kinship with this woman, her waving hands and focused attention.
“You have to have some direction,” said her mother, who hated being lost. “Just stick with something. Stop… flirting.”
“You have to figure out what you want,” said her father, who hated staying still.
“Dude, you have to try this flappy bird game,” said her little brother, who had excellent priorities.
Darcy came home for Thanksgiving and, stuffed on turkey, beat her older brother’s best Donkey Kong Jr. score. She did it almost accidentally, had a streak of luck and older hands. She switched off the TV and locked herself in the bathroom until she could catch her breath. She washed her face and redid her makeup and made it back in time for pumpkin pie.
A week after Darcy got back to Jane’s side, her cell rang and the image of her little brother’s stuck-out tongue appeared on screen.
“Dude,” he said when she picked up.
“Dude,” she agreed.
“Found some stupid new band,” he told her. “All waily and clangy and shit. You might like it. I’mma text you the name, okay?”
Darcy told him all about a great taqueria they’d found (they were in the southwest US again, and she'd missed the food). It had carnitas he’d cry over, she promised, and no she wasn’t a mailing a burrito to him. (She did send him a photo of that night’s steaming dinner and her own grinning face above it).
She would have bet good money that had been the first time he had seen the Donkey Kong score rankings since Thanksgiving. She called him the next morning, so he could complain at her about evil sisters with photographic powers and get his revenge by sending a picture of Lewis family trout (mom-caught, dad-prepared).
“Don’t you care about anything?” her mother had snapped once. She had apologized immediately after and Darcy had put her head on her mother’s shoulder and let them both breathe. It had just been one joke too many on a fragile day. Her mother had known the answer even as she said it.
But words like that, they tangle up in you like brambles. Even when they’re not meant, even when they’re taken back, they tangle deep.
Darcy knew her own heart. She knew her barbed smiles and her careless hands and she knew her heart. She knew that most people only saw the first two.
Selvig eyed Darcy with complacent confusion and Darcy took special joy in tormenting the SHIELD agents at their oh-so-serious work. But after those first few months, Jane never questioned her dedication.
Jane paid attention, more attention than anyone Darcy had ever met. It was to weird things—not groceries or the SHIELD agents’ names or how she liked her own coffee. But Jane watched the stars, and all her little instruments, and she watched Darcy. She didn’t understand her and she didn’t try to solve her. Jane was a scientist, not a mathematician.
“People do their careers, not live them,” Darcy had told a career counselor once, but she hadn’t met Jane yet.
“You’re directionless,” the counselor has said once, but she hadn’t understood, she hadn’t. Darcy had a compass in her purse.
They went to Amsterdam, Kentucky, South Africa. Answers weren't coming, so SHIELD's interest was waning, and so was it's funding. "Bureaucracy," Darcy sang at Jane, "Tax payer dollars," and they moved in with Jane's mother in London. Free rent, and there were some storm warnings there. As much as anywhere else, at least.
Ian was not the only applicant to Darcy’s internship, but he wasn't there for glamour or the Avenger's girlfriend. It seemed like he really wanted to be there and she liked that.
There was a drive in him Darcy would scoffed at once, but she knew Jane now. She knew Jane’s thirst for the truth and Thor’s determination to do good, to be better. They weren’t her, they and their life-changing driving ambitions, but they were real.
She wasn’t them, and that was okay, too.
“Six units a semester,” said Darcy. “Twelve if you get stuck in an alien invasion.” She’d had SHIELD arrange that for her, after the New Mexico incident.
Besides, Ian was cute. Sue her.
When the storm finally rolled into London, Darcy found Jane on a nice little date with some squinty accountant or other. She dangled the beeping monitor under Jane’s nose, complimented her showering habits, and left.
She waited in the car when she got downstairs; Darcy was years into this now, her half-finished BA floating somewhere in the metadata. She knew better than to expect Jane to function for long on a date when there was science to do.
When she spotted Jane in the rear view window she grinned.
“I am not dying for the sake of science,” Darcy told Jane beside a wormhole in an abandoned London building. It was true. She would sacrifice Ian’s shoe, though. She’d blame it on Jane’s empirical curiosity rubbing off, but Darcy remembered being the kind of kid who would drop balls off the top of the play structure to see which would bounce highest and to see which teacher would scream bloody murder about it.
The problem was: Jane would die for the sake of science. It was only hours (then) that she was gone, but they were long hours, cold hours, pacing cold concrete and finally calling the police.
“What did you do Jane, what did you do?”
Jane wouldn’t die for the sake of science, Darcy told herself. She told Ian, too, and he nodded at her, wide-eyed. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, if she died she wouldn’t be able to write it down and Mythbusters said that then it wasn’t science.
She couldn’t, she couldn’t, she should never be that still—Jane came out into the parking lot and Darcy caught her breath.
Darcy had only minutes for her world to feel repaired. Jane came back, but the storm came, too, and Thor with it. The aether lashed out and Thor took Jane by the waist and they both vanished.
Darcy squinted up into the rain, feeling her sneakers soak through. “Well, I suppose I’d have only been a third wheel,” she told Ian.
Darcy twitched through the days and through the nights while Jane was gone, not that she didn’t always. The universe was asking for her patience and she wasn't having it. It had not earned her stillness.
Jane was gone in Thor's (safe) hands. (They were safe, right? They had to be, lightning and thunder, heroes and gods, they had to be).
While Jane marveled and burned, while Thor worried, Sif worried, and Loki schemed, Darcy buried herself in work. She dragged Jane's equipment to the empty building, but found nothing helpful. She tossed pebbles down the wormhole while she squinted at beeping equipment and dialed every number she had managed to win, cajole, or steal--astrophysicists and SHIELD operatives, government agents and nice old land ladies who had boarded them on their various stops around the globe.
The astrophysicists were bewildered, SHIELD refused to talk to her, and the land ladies reported behavior at their old test sites that sounded similar to the phenomenon that Darcy was presently chucking paper airplanes into, as she had run out of nearby pebbles.
It says something about her life, that her bright spot, her shining beacon of hope breaking through the clouds, was a man running naked around Stonehenge on the nightly news.
Darcy made Ian do the lying at the station, when they went to pick up Erik Selvig. What else were interns for? Getting coffee, she mused.
Darcy made calls and threats, read articles and tossed things into wormholes. Selvig helped them paint a picture of what was going on, even if he did refuse to keep his pants on.
At two in the morning, a phone tucked between shoulder and ear, paging through particles and emails looking for some hint of what was going on, Darcy accidentally glanced in a reflective surface. Her hair was frazzled, and she had wrapped herself in a checked blanket sometime around midnight.
"Oh god I look like Jane," she said, shrugged, and went back to work.
Jane and Thor breezed in though the front door a few days later, as though they hadn't just boomed off in a parking lot full of cops and not called home afterward.
Darcy didn't stop moving. Erik was waving his hands, describing a world that was ending. (Well, worlds). Thor was somber in ways Darcy had only seen in those moments when he was walking to his death in New Mexico, asking for it to come from his brother's slim hands.
Darcy thought about her own little brother, across an ocean and a few time zones, who sent her teasing pictures of homecooking she missed.
We can have a little order in our lives, but it doesn’t change the universe.
But why is the universe my business?
Darcy would not die for the sake of anything but herself. But this was her self now: Jane, her flannel and her flustered hands; Selvig’s babbling, lovable self; Thor’s heartfelt bulk and Ian’s ready enthusiasm; her little brother living safe in a world not swallowed by grumpy elf dude’s ugly darkness.
Here they were: a pantsless PhD and another in red boots and flannel, an intern and her intern, a hammer and its golden retriever. With Myu-myu, some duct tape, and Jane’s fury, they would save the world(s).
On the way to Greenwich, while Jane feverishly taped up equipment in the back seat, Darcy texted her little brother love you, dumbass.
Her phone buzzed somewhere between planting Erik's equipment, kissing Ian, and being chased by weird grey alien dudes. Darcy didn't check it until after. I beat your flappy bird score.
Ah, a declaration of fraternal love. Also a challenge--Darcy figured that saving the world(s) gave one a moral prerogative to spend one's entire afternoon playing mindless but infuriating games on a phone.
Jane caught a flight to Asgard with Thor and Darcy caught the first overseas flight to America. She spent a month hiking, fishing, lazing, and beating her brother at video games. When Darcy felt like she might shake herself out of her skin if she tried to stay still a moment longer in that little old house, she bought tickets back to London. Ian and Erik were hard at work and could use at least Darcy's good humor, if not her sharp eye.
Her mother drove her to the airport. They hugged for a long time in front of the departures terminal. Her mother cupped her cheek and said, "You've found it, haven't you?"
"Like, my vocation?" Darcy waggled her fingers and her mother smiled, warm, fond. Darcy shook her head. "No, I don’t think I did. This isn’t my purpose, my obsession, my—I’ve seen people with those things and that’s not me. I found a place, mom. I found a place where I am happy and that’s enough, maybe, I don’t know."
It was two months in London before Jane dropped back to Earth and gave Darcy an Asgardian battery for her iPod and another internship offer.
"That's a bit farther than New Mexico," said Darcy. "A bit longer term, too," she added, already planning what to pack.
Jane grinned and for a moment they were as in rhythm as they ever would be. "That's kinda the idea."
Darcy smacked a kiss on Ian's cheek and then Erik's. "Keep an eye on the shop, will you, boys?"
When Darcy stepped out into the Bifrost, she brushed rainbows from her prickling skin. There was a glorious antechamber and a sparkling bridge leading beyond, out to a shining city, but Darcy was struck, staring, at the large man with a sword who was looking steadily at her.
She tried to shrink—here was Jane, the genius, and Thor, the hero. She tried to bluster, roll her eyes and grin at Jane, so his heavy gaze would slide of her fool’s pretense.
But this was Heimdall, the gate keeper. Being seen by his steady gaze was like nothing else in the world. Darcy raised her chin and looked back, looked back.
"What happened to your eye?" Darcy asked Odin. They were the first words out of her mouth, just to see which way this sharp, hard monarch would jump. She figured that if Odin tried to do anything painfully permanent to her, Thor probably liked her enough to stop him.
Darcy made Sif laugh a month after she arrived. She felt like she'd conquered some massive enemy army with a flick of her hand. She walked tall all day.
Darcy made Hogan smirk, Volstagg laugh, and Fandrall topple to the floor with hilarity, but she counted Sif's smiles and snorts, hoarded them like stolen treasure. Darcy wondered what she was stealing them from.
Sif took Jane and her out to the city, which Darcy was exploring anyway. Years wandering earth had made her wary, not shy.
Sometimes it was just Darcy and Sif, eating weird spicy-sweet food and talking, these two women who watched so well, whose sight was forgotten in favor of their strength of arms, their careless tongue. Sif had spent centuries watching Thor's shining back, and Darcy bounced along in Jane's fervent wake.
Jane, beautiful and brilliant, was sick of people looking at her for the wrong reasons, but so were they. Sif kept a big sword at her armored side, sure, but she caught every movement on the street, assessed it, and catalogued the data for later. Darcy wondered what her story was, so she asked.
Sif looked surprised, but she met Darcy's eyes. Darcy wondered when the last time had been that someone looked at Sif, really looked. Sif ordered them a new round of drinks and her life dropped out of her lips with a soldier's precision.
Sif reminded her of her older brother, not desperate to please, but to serve. Stiff, with little bits of humor tucked away like a bright meadow found at the end of a very long day of orienteering with her father. It made the whole trip worthwhile.
Her big brother had wanted to matter. He had wanted to mean something.
And he had.
Darcy went out late, wandering Asgardian streets until the night grew dark enough to let her see the stars. After years beside Jane, Earth’s stars named and mapped for her, this new sky was as alien as the people who lived under it. Darcy stared up and wrote her brother’s name in sky, eyes jumping from light to light.
The sky didn’t care, all burning balls of gas and ceaseless entropy. Nobody else would know, not these Asgardians and their weird constellation stories or Jane, who was feverishly learning the names of each new star. But there was a girl with half a BA standing in alien streets, her head tilted back. Her brother’s name was written in the sky, and that was enough.
We can have a little order in our lives, but it doesn’t change the universe.
It doesn’t matter to the universe, so it has to matter to us.
Darcy got up in the mornings and put in her ear buds. She stayed up late to bully Jane into bed. She set up experiments and flirted with Asgardians and wandered the city. She took out her brother's compass and some stiff paper and made a map.
Who wanted to stay still anyway?
Darcy went down to swing her heels and provide an extra set of hands while Jane and Heimdall scienced around the Bifrost. Jane was absorbed in some beeping flashing bits, but Heimdall drifted over to Darcy like a glacier. You could barely see him move, but you could barely ignore it either.
"Darcy Lewis," he said. "I have not seen you."
Darcy looked herself down and then up. "Last I checked I wasn't invisible. And I have been here before. Remember, throwing popcorn at Jane? Dragging her off to bed by a cute little pigtail?"
"I have seen you here. But down on Midgard, even among great happenings, you never caught my eye."
"Thank you, I'm flattered."
He made a short huff that she realized was a laugh. "You hide."
"Me? C'mon, anyone will tell you I'm the loudest girl they know. Obnoxious. Self-centered. A crude attention seeker."
"That is only noise."
"Exactly. That's all I am, all you get, just noise, just this." She hooked her thumb in the rainbow suspenders she'd picked up when they were chasing phenomena through SF.
"It is all we get," Heimdall agreed. "It is not all you are."
Darcy snapped a suspender and then winced audibly. "Well, don't go around telling everyone, OK?"