Work Text:
Egg on Your Face
“You’re a dead woman, Lewis.”
“Oh, shit.”
Clint stands at the entrance to the lab, a paper bag and a box in his hands and a deep, deep desire for murder in his eyes. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. Three days had passed since Bucky had arrived at the Tower, two since Steve had introduced him one-on-one to each member of the team (Darcy had safely hidden in the storage closet by the lab, huddling behind a massive wall of toilet paper, to avoid a repeat performance of their initial interaction), and one day since, presumably, Clint had tried to initiate Phase One of his epic plan to become best friends with Bucky ‘Don’t-call-me-Winter-Soldier’ Barnes.
Darcy looks at Clint, at the way his eye twitches and his lip curls. She reckons it must have gone badly.
“You told him,” Clint says, stepping into the lab, “about the Bucky Bear.”
Scratch that. It must have gone very badly.
“Um… no, I didn’t.”
“He said you did.”
“And who are you going to believe?” Darcy asks, raising her brows at him. “Me, your friend, or the dude who tried, on multiple occasions I might add, to heinously murder the love of your life and, like, half of everyone else you know?”
“Him.”
Darcy folds her arms across her chest and tries not to pout. “You’re a traitor, Barton.”
“I’m the traitor? You’re the one who told him about the bear, which I told to you in confidence, by the way.”
“Actually, you told it to me in drunkenness—”
Clint narrows his eyes at her.
“—which is not the point,” Darcy admits. “And, by the way, I didn’t tell Bucky about the bear. I told Jane.”
Clint’s jaw drops and Darcy knows she’s doomed. “Jane knows?”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of? How can someone kind of know?”
Darcy opens her mouth to try to worm her way out of trouble, but no salvation comes to mind. Deflating, she says, “Okay. Yes. She knows. But I did not tell Bucky.”
“Then how does he know?”
Darcy’s eyes dart around the lab, searching for an escape route she already knows doesn’t exist. Only one door led to freedom and continued life and limb, and before that door stood one irate and possibly deranged former assassin.
She was so fucked.
“Lewis!”
Darcy jumps at the sharp crack of his voice. “He may have, uh,” she starts to ease back from her workstation, “possibly, well, more likely,” she stumbles over her bag, “overheard us.”
“What?!”
She winces at his piercing tone. No wonder they called him Hawkeye. “Well, how was I supposed to know he had such freakishly good hearing?”
“You live with Steve! You spent an entire week figuring out his exact range of hearing so you could play ‘Captain Got Back’ on an endless loop without him wanting to murder you.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
She smirks at the memory. All had been well until Tony had wandered into the lab one day while she played it and then promptly ordered Jarvis to play the song whenever Steve entered a room occupied by one or more members of the team. After a week of this, Darcy thought that Steve would abandon his principle of protecting civilians and defending the defenseless to murder her in her sleep for inadvertently introducing the song to Tony.
Which brings her back to—
“What else did you say about me?” Clint asks her now.
“Uh… nothing?”
He stares at her a long moment, his eyes narrowed to tiny, gleaming slits. Darcy tries not to pee her pants. She understands a little better the attraction between Clint and Natasha. Both of them were scary as fuck when they wanted to be.
“Yes, you did,” Clint says softly. “You said something else. Learning about the bear wouldn’t have made him that awkward around me. Thousands of people had those bears.”
It’s times like these that Darcy wishes she was a super awesome spy. Then she would know how to school her features to hide the truth, the memory that suddenly flashes into her mind of her blurting out at an excessively high volume about how Clint had a huge boner for Bucky Barnes.
“Uh…”
“Don’t lie to me, Lewis. You won’t like the consequences.”
It’s shit like this that gets her into trouble. And Clint knows it because he knows her. Because she told him about the bar in Puente Antiguo and the stuffy party in Tromso and the ride from hell on the Tube in London. She tries to be calm, to be cool, to be like Natasha, existing high above the petty baiting of men, but then Clint smirks at her and Darcy lifts her chin into the air.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“You should be,” he says. He lifts his hand, and she realizes that he doesn’t hold a box in it like she first thought.
He holds a half-carton of eggs.
Oh, shit.
Why? Why would Bucky have mentioned her boner comment to Clint? He was supposed to be good now. An American hero. A stand up guy. Steve liked him for a reason. But then she recalls the utter delight he took in Jane’s account of her kicking her traitorous scumbag of an ex in the balls before tazering him in the ass, and she knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that he would. He so would.
She narrows her eyes.
Bucky Barnes was a dead man.
Her gaze drops to the eggs.
If Clint didn’t kill her first.
Speaking of—
Clint looks at her another moment, clearly waiting for her to spill her guilty guts, but she can’t now. She’s blustered too far. She lifts her chin further into the air and tries to stare him down. His smirk widens into a terrifying grin, and she watches in a tiny bit of trepidation as he reaches behind him to close the door to the lab.
“Do you know what they used to do to betrayers in the past, Darcy?” He doesn’t wait for her to finish, or to properly process her complete and utter dread at him calling her by her first name. He continues on, easing a few steps closer, engaging, as he does, in an epic villain monologue with surprising ease. “Tar and feathering. The first use of it allegedly occurred during the Crusades, from Richard the fucking Lionhearted. They did it during the American Revolution too. And in both World Wars. Think of that. For over eight hundred years, people have been tarring and feathering no good, low down, dirty traitors. Now, I can’t use tar against you. Thor would kill me. And, you know, you are my friend. But I will smash every single one of these eggs against your traitorous face and dump so many feathers on you that people are going to think you mutated into a giant, evil, lying chicken.”
Darcy’s eyes widen. She feels her mouth go dry. “You wouldn’t.”
Clint says nothing. He just shifts the paper bag to his left hand, the one holding the eggs, and reaches into it, unearthing a gallon sized freezer bag jam packed with brightly colored feathers.
Darcy eyes the bag and the feathers inside. Those, maybe, she could avoid if she evaded Clint long enough to flee the lab. Not the eggs though. Not from the greatest marksman in the world. Darcy wasn’t that fast or agile. At the very least then, she was half doomed, ensured to have at least three of those suckers used against her, so she does what all the doomed do when faced with their inevitable doom.
She makes it worse.
“You won’t,” she says, lifting her chin again, “or I’ll tell Bucky all about your fanboy drawings.”
Clint blanches and Darcy unleashes her own evil grin.
“Forgot you showed me those, didn’t you? Well, you did, and it doesn’t matter if you try to destroy them now to stop me. I took a picture of everything, so all I have to do is send him a file.”
“Then all I have to do,” he says, his voice rising in pitch, “is give Steve all the copies I made of your Captain America fanfiction! I got everything, Lewis. Even the porn.”
She feels her face flush. Clint confirms it half a second later with a shit-eating grin. Well, if he wanted to play that game, she could play that game. “You do that and I’ll tell Tony that it was you who cut all his whiskey and scotch with apple cider vinegar.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“I would.”
“Then I’ll tell him about the cotton balls!”
“Then I’ll tell him about the bird nests!”
“Then I’ll tell him about the fire!”
“Oh, you are so dead!”
“Not if I dead you first!”
Darcy dives as Clint opens the carton of eggs. She reaches for the fire extinguisher beneath the countertop, fumbling as Clint barrels across the lab. Her fingers clamp down as Clint rounds the island. He opens fire then, flinging the first egg. Darcy grunts as it splats against her back, but she doesn’t deviate from her mission, yanking the extinguisher free and letting the foam fly. She manages to douse half of Clint before he bats the extinguisher away, looming over her to smash another egg against her head. Darcy scrambles for her bag before he pins her down. She manages to get her foot in his face long enough to distract him, and she seizes her glitter as he pulls out his third egg. Clint pins her leg to the floor and raises the egg, so Darcy looks past him and widens her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Bruce—”
Clint stills and his eyes dart to the side. As they do, Darcy upends the glitter on his head, swiping a glob of egg yolk from her hair to smash into his face.
“You’re so gullible, Clinton. So—”
The third egg catches her right in the chest. Darcy gasps as bits of shell and yolk drip down her shirt.
“Not the boobs!” she bellows. “They’re sacred territory!”
“More sacred than my dick, Lewis?” Clint shakes his head and sends glitter raining down on her sticky chest. “You didn’t seem to have any hesitation at all when you talked to Bucky Barnes about my dick!”
“For the last time,” she says as she kicks the egg carton out of his reach, “I told Jane about your dick and its epic man-love for Bucky, not Bucky himself.”
“That doesn’t make it better!”
“Well, it should!”
Clint grunts as he tries to grasp the carton of eggs. He leans over just enough for Darcy to wiggle free. She’s up and charging across the lab when he looses two eggs in quick succession, both aimed at her ass. She crashes against the door and fumbles for the control; her fingers, sticky with egg, smear fingerprints all over the screen. In the glass, she sees Clint approach, the final egg in one hand and the bag of feathers in the other. Desperate, she tilts her face up toward the ceiling and cries out, "Jarvis! Open the lab door!”
“My apologies, Ms. Lewis. But it seems that Mr. Stark has temporarily revoked your access privileges. Something about glitter in his exhaust ports, I believe.”
Her eyes widen as an access panel opens above her head. A second later Tony pops into view followed by an enormous bag of feathers, primed and ready to blow.
The smile that he sends her way can only be described as diabolical. “Payback’s a bitch, Lewis.”
Clint flings the final egg as Tony blows the bag. The egg smashes two inches from Darcy’s head. She recoils, twisting around just as they had planned, just in time to catch the feathers full in the face. With a grimace, she realizes that it’s not just feathers adhering to her sticky body as they fall, but also multi-colored, penis-shaped confetti, the kind used for bachelorette parties.
She wonders as both Clint and Tony start to laugh if she would be considered a super-villain if she murdered the both of them, both Hawkeye and Iron Man and, possibly, likely, the newly reformed Winter Soldier, in their beds as they slept.
She hopes so, especially when she hears the click of a camera and looks up to find Clint taking a picture of her in all her egg-and-feather glory with his phone. She takes little triumph in the fact that he bears war wounds too, Clint half-covered in foam and glitter with a sticky smear of yolk across his face.
“This means war, dude.”
“Oh, I know it does,” Clint says as he snags another picture. “And I’ve already got Phases Two, Three, and Four completely planned out. Tony helped me.”
Darcy tilts her head to glare at Tony. He wags his eyebrows at her, his face bright with manic triumph.
“You can avoid your complete and utter annihilation,” Clint continues, “if you can convince Bucky that I’m not a horny, lecherous stalker already planning our epic spy wedding to each other.”
“So you want me to lie?” Darcy asks, mutinous, casting her glare now on Clint.
He rips open his bag of feathers, reaching inside to grab a handful. “Complete and utter annihilation, Lewis. Not even Thor can save you.”
She contemplates fighting on for two more seconds, but the prospect of an extended engagement against both Clint and Tony without any allies (Clint usually her ally against Tony) dissuades her. “Fine. Fine. I’ll do it.”
“Great,” Clint says, grinning now. “You have thirty minutes.”
“What?!”
“Better get going, kid,” Tony says from above her. “You’ll probably need at least fifteen of those to convince Steve to let you in the door.”
“And another ten just to wait out their laughter at your appearance right now.”
Darcy eyes first one and then the other. She knows she looks like a deranged gay chicken farm from the 1970s exploded all over her. No doubt that was their intention. She wonders for half a second if Bucky had any part to play in this portion of their plan, if he’d mentioned, deliberately or inadvertently, her somewhat lecherous ogling of him when they first met. She glances at Clint again. The sly look in his eyes makes her think yes. Well, if they thought that this would cow her in any way or increase their chances for success, they certainly had another think coming.
“Thirty minutes?” she says, turning for the door. “I’ll do it in twenty.”
Shoulders high, Darcy waits for Jarvis to open the lab door. When he does, she doesn’t look back at Clint or Tony, channeling, she thinks, Natasha fairly well in her aloof demeanor as she walks down the hall to the elevator and to her complete and utter doom.
*