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Darcy had been having a normal couple of weeks. How surprising. Usually there was something going on- either outside of the tower (the attack of the giant gummy bears had been a sticky situation to say the least- HA! Sticky…) or inside (Tony’s penguins… Darcy was still trying to figure out how that madness had ever happened). But these past few weeks had been pretty quiet. A normal person would have enjoyed the peace. But that was a normal person. Darcy wasn’t normal. She couldn’t possibly be normal because normal people would simply enjoy the peace and quiet- not be unnerved by it.
And she was unnerved by it. It just wasn’t natural.
Jane was in the lab. Not unusual.
Bruce was not in the lab (huh, must be his day to eat). Not unusual.
The lab smelled like coffee. Not unusual (depending on what the scientists were working on, sometimes it smelled like grapples).
The lab was a bit… breezy? Not usual. Unusual.
“Huh.” She could hear Jane say. “That wasn’t what I was going for…”
Darcy’s hair whipped around her as the breeze picked up. “What the- Jane!”
There was a brief scramble as the other woman realized Darcy had come back into the labs. “It’s fine! Everything’s fine! I’m fine!” Jane shouted somewhat frantically from somewhere among the machines. “Ignore the wind! That’s… uh, supposed to happen!”
Darcy wasn’t buying a word Jane was saying. She put down the files she was carrying only to have them inch forward by the wind’s pull. Wait, pull? Wind didn’t pull- it blew. This wasn’t wind- this was… suction? “Jane! What did you do?!” Darcy had to raise her voice a bit- the sucky-wind was starting to whistle.
“Nothing!”
“Nothing with you is always something! Spill! Now!” Darcy cringed. She was sounding like her grade school teacher. Dear god, no.
“It’s nothing- just one of the machines I recalibrated. That’s all! I’ll have it fixed in a bit- just bear with me. Ok?”
Darcy felt a bit better. It was entirely possible that one of the machines was doing this. She shrugged and put her coffee mug down on top of the files to keep them from falling off the desk. “Ok.” Ignoring the breeze (and even deciding it was kind of nice) Darcy sat and began entering data into the computer.
Darcy ignored it when the breeze kicked up a bit. She ignored how the papers on her desk fluttered without something weighing them down. She even ignored it when the breeze started to make sucking noises. But when it stole her pencils- that was the last straw.
Darcy’s pencils were in a cup on her desk that she’d painted Ms. Frizzle and the Magic School Bus on (because, come on- Avengers Tower was totally the magic school bus to her inner 4th grader). Just after the sucking noises had begun her pencils started to rattle in their cup. Suddenly, Darcy’s pencils started shooting eraser first into Jane’s general direction. After each pencil went sailing there was a ‘shoomp’ noise.
“My pencils!” Shoomp. “That’s it!” Shoomp. “Jarvis,” shoomp “what’s Jane doing?” Shoomp.
“It would appear, that Dr. Foster has inadvertently opened a black hole.”
“WHAT!!!!” Shoomp. Damn, that was the last of her pencils. “JANE!”
Jane’s head popped up like a Meer cat. “…It was an accident?”
Clint dropped from the ceiling. “That’s comforting.”
Darcy huffed. “Not really.”
Clint eyed her skeptically. “You’d rather she opened one intentionally?”
“I’d rather there not be a black hole at all,” Darcy snapped as she grabbed for the Friz before the black hole could take the cup holder too.
Clint smirked and clucked his tongue at her. “Picky, picky, picky.” Darcy glared at him but Clint just smirked at her. “Besides. If she had done it intentionally then that would make her a super villain.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Not a very good one…”
Jane’s head popped up in a different place. “Hey! I resent that! I’d be a great super villain! I just made a black hole!” She said before disappearing again.
“Accidentally!” Darcy fired back. Looking at Clint she continued. “At least if it were intentional we wouldn’t run the risk of another accidental opening later on.”
Clint nodded thoughtfully. “Good point.” He turned to where they’d last seen Jane. “Hey, Doc! How do we shut it off?”
Jane’s head popped up in another completely different place- behind them. Darcy didn’t even want to begin to fathom how the woman had done that. Maybe she should limit Jane’s interactions with the spysassins. She was obviously picking some things up. Even Clint seemed surprised. Natasha. This was definitely Natasha’s doing. Darcy would have to get the woman to teach her how to do that later.
Jane’s eyes were wide as she pressed her lips together. “Um…”
Darcy recognized that look. It was the face Jane made when she was trying to think of an answer but had none to give. Darcy sighed. “It’s not a lamp, Barton. I doubt you can just shut it off.”
“So put a cork in it,” he teased.
“… I don’t think you can cork a black hole.”
Clint shrugged. “It always works in the cartoons.”
“Alright, Spy vs. Spy.” Darcy said. “How about you go pull the plug instead?”
Clint whined. “Why do I have to do it?”
Darcy crossed her arms. “Because you’re an Avenger. It’s what you do.”
Clint shrugged. He couldn’t argue- it was a true. “Fair enough.”
Darcy and Jane (from yet another location- seriously, how was she doing that?) watched as Clint walked over to the machines.
“Which one is it, Doc?”
“The one with the flashing lights.”
They all had flashing lights. “They all have flashing lights.”
“The blue lights.”
Ah, right. Stepping behind it Clint noticed the black hole. Huh, it was kinda cute. In an endless-space-vacuum sort of way. Clint snickered as a scene from Space Balls flashed in his mind. He wondered if space maids cleaned with black holes… Darcy’s voice interrupted his musings.
“Stop thinking about Dark Helmet and unplug it!”
How did she know? How did she always know? Clint bent down and followed the machine’s cord to the crowded surge protector. “Alright, here goes.” Clint tugged the cord and unplugged the machine, watching as the lights stopped flickering. “Nope, still on... er, open.”
“Now what?”
Not knowing what else to do the three of them went around the lab weighing things down before leaving and asking Jarvis to seal the glass doors. Standing in the hallway they looked in through the wall of windows and watched as every piece of paper in the lab fluttered.
Darcy rubbed her face and sat down with her back to the lab. She wasn’t paid enough for this. “Great. Just great. Your black hole is going to eat everything!”
Jane huffed. “Can we stop calling it a hole? That makes the situation sound so… bad.” She sat down next to her assistant on the floor. Clint followed.
Darcy huffed back. “The situation is bad, Jane. You opened a black hole.”
“What’s going on?” Tony asked as he stepped off the elevator down the hall. “Jarvis said I should get up here.”
“Jane opened up a black hole!”
Tony’s eyebrows shot up at Darcy’s words. He knew Jane was brilliant, but da-yum.
“It’s not a hole.” Jane responded.
Darcy crossed her arms. “Then what is it?” She pinned Jane with a poignant stare.
“… Ok, it’s a hole,” the woman conceded. “But it’s a small one!”
Darcy face palmed. “I don’t care how small it is! You ripped open space in the lab! We don’t even have a code for this sort of emergency! And we live with Tony Stark! We have codes for everything! Boots on fire, penguins, space pets, homicidal toasters, evil candy, and green smashing machines with limited vocabularies!”
“Um,” Tony interrupted as he joined them on the floor. “I would like to point out that half of those are not because of me. Jarvis, remind me to set a new code for black holes.”
“Of course, sir.”
Darcy sighed. “Not helping, Tony.”
Tony shrugged. “At least it’s a tiny one.”
“It ate all my pencils.”
“I’ll buy you more.” Turning to Jane, Tony stuck his hands in his back pockets. “You gonna name it?”
Clint looked at him sideways. “It’s a black hole, not a dog.”
Tony shrugged. “Black holes deserve names too.” Thinking for a moment, Tony nodded decisively. “Let’s name it Bob.”
Jane’s eyes lit up. “Ooooo, that’s good- I like Bob.”
Darcy scrubbed her face with her hands. Was no one else in this tower sane?
“Why is everyone outside?” Steve asked as he and Bucky came walking up.
“Jane opened up a black hole in the lab,” Tony answered.
“WHAT?” Steve eyes widened and Bucky’s eyebrows raised in disbelief.
“Finally!” Darcy shouted as she raised her hands toward the ceiling. “Someone with an appropriate response!”
“How do we close it?” Steve was using his Captain America voice again.
Tony and Jane both gasped. “‘It’ has a name!” Tony said sounding insulted.
“‘Its’ name is Bob!” Jane finished.
“He’s just misunderstood,” Clint said with a nod as he smirked.
The only way to describe the look on Steve’s face was tire blow out on the freeway. Great, they’d broken Captain America. “… What?”
Darcy groaned. “Welcome to my hell.”
“At least it’s not cold,” Bucky grumbled.
“Space is cold, Bucky.” Darcy responded.
Tony flinched immediately after she’d finished speaking. “Very,” he said, eyes far away.
Oops. Darcy shot Tony an apologetic look. Sometimes she forgot that the inventor had seen the depths of space. She had a feeling it had been one of those ‘he gazed into the abyss and the abyss gazed back’ moments.
“Has anyone just tried unplugging the machine?” Everyone turned to see Bruce sitting with them along the window wall cleaning his glasses. Darcy stared at him. Seriously? When had he gotten here? Was everyone able to do the ninja thing but her? She and Nat were going to have words later.
“Yeah,” Clint nodded. “Darcy made me do it.”
Darcy sighed. “And then it ate all my pens.”
Tony looked at her. “I thought it ate all your pencils?”
“First the pencils. Then the pens.”
“When it went after the post-its I all but cried,” Jane added, looking at Bruce.
Bruce nodded sagely. The loss of post-its was a loss he understood well. Hulk seemed to like them and would pull every one of them apart whenever he came out for a visit like a cat goes through tissue. He once woke up surrounded by thousands of little colored squares of paper. That had been a dark day. Tony had thought it was hilarious and the next day there were 2ft x 2ft stacks of green post-its all over the lab. Tony had just shrugged. “You know, in case the big guy wants to take a note or something.” The man had a weird sense of humor, but Bruce had a sneaking suspicion that Tony was serious. The man could be oddly sincere at the most unexpected times.
“If I may interrupt,” Jarvis toned, “Agent Romanov has returned and is on her way up.”
Everyone froze.
Tony recovered first. “Stall her, J.”
“That would be unnecessary as I have alerted Agent Romanov of the situation.”
Tony’s eyes bugged a bit. “Now why would you do that?!”
“If we keep this from her, she will find out and hell hath no fury, sir.”
“What makes you think she’d find out?” Tony asked back.
Everyone stopped and stared at him.
“The Black Widow always finds out, sir.”
Before anyone else could answer, the elevator doors chimed and slid open. Natasha stalked out toward them like a tiger- looking deceptively disinterested at the sight before her but completely alert and gracefully in control. She came upon the group and began a silent conversation with Clint and Darcy.
The others were quite used to the spies being ‘eyelingual,’ as Tony put it and usually thought nothing of their silent eyebrow conversations. Darcy had picked it up not too long after coming to the Tower. The three of them regularly conversed in this silent way without much more than a fleeting glance from the others. Today however, everyone was paying attention. Bucky, being fluent in eyebrow himself, watched the conversation but didn’t join in. Bruce also watched, though he refrained from joining because he understood better than communicated.
Out of the others, Tony was the only one trying to actually interpret the conversation, and hey! He was getting better at this! Darcy had been giving him lessons and he’d been practicing in earnest. He could totally translate this. Now they were telling Natasha what was wrong. And now they were arguing about solutions… And now Natasha was telling them that a moose was loose in St. Petersburg… ok, maybe he still needed more lessons…
As they watched, the conversation seemed to grow more heated. Natasha nodded and all four of the others shook their heads. Darcy looked at her like she’d lost her mind, Clint looked resigned, Bruce looked reasonable, and Bucky just scowled. Natasha raised her hand in a swift halting gesture and nodded a second time before turning and walking into the lab. Everyone stood quickly and watched from the windows as the woman approached the hole, hair whipping her cheeks.
“What’s going on?” Jane asked.
Bucky grunted. “She’s going to close it.”
"Bob," Clint corrected.
Before anyone could ask how Natasha intended to pull that off, the woman walked up to the hole and – “Is she … glaring at Bob?”
Darcy would later swear she heard Bob whimper before closing in on itself and disappearing with a tiny satisfying ‘pop.’
“Goodbye Bob,” Clint said.
“She did not just do that,” Jane gasped out, completely perplexed.
Jarvis opened the lab doors for Natasha as she walked back out.
Tony looked so confused. He was so not ok with this. “…That… doesn’t even make sense,” he said, staring at the spy with half crazed eyes.
Darcy crossed her arms. “This is Avengers Tower, Tony. Nothing ever makes sense.”
“Yeah, but... science.”
Just then the elevator doors slid open to allow Sam and Thor off, each man holding several pizza boxes (Sam had 4 and Thor looked like he had 10). “Pizza!” Sam shouted happily before coming to a halt. “Why’s everyone in the hallway?”
Natasha walked over and peaked inside the top box Sam was holding. Sam shook his head. “Nope, yours is the next one.” Smiling, Nat took the box indicated from him and nodded her thanks before turning to head toward the kitchen.
Tony turned to Clint. “They experimented on her too, didn’t they. She’s some sort of walking WMD with cosmic powers.”
Clint snorted. “If she is, just be happy she’s on our side.”
*
Hours later after the pizzas had been sufficiently devoured (seriously, there’s no such thing as leftovers with super soldiers and Norse gods around- no Thor, get your own! You’ve had 3 pizzas already!) Darcy found Natasha reading on the couch.
“You’ve been teaching Jane how to move through shadows like you do and pop in and out of no where.” It wasn’t a question.
Natasha shrugged. “Jane picks up more than she realizes. The fact that she does it without realizing is proof of that. I have not been actively trying to teach her, but the result is not bad. It should prove useful if she’s ever under attack.”
Darcy sat down next to her. “Will you teach me to do it too?”
Natasha tilted her head inconsideration. She’d never admit it, but Darcy was one of her favorites- not that she needed to. It was pretty obvious that the woman had a soft spot for the assistant. Nat pursed her lips. “Will you swear to only use your powers for good?”
“No.”
Natasha smiled. “Good girl. We start tomorrow,” she said before turning back to her book.
“YES!” Darcy fist pumped before jumping up off the couch. Tomorrow was gonna be a good day.