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"I just got recruited to be your office monkey, in a Starbucks, because I can SCUBA dive. I don't even think my brain can process how awesome that is."
It would have been at least fifty percent more awesome if, perhaps, they didn't expect her to use her SCUBA certification.
Darcy Lewis had gotten her Advanced Open Water Diver SCUBA certification on December 13, finished her last final exam (ever! . . . maybe) on December 15, and had technically graduated on December 18. There was not enough chocolate or alcohol in the world to make her go to the formal graduation ceremony, so she was done on the fifteenth.
Really, after meeting a Norse god or two, meeting the mere president of a university would have been profoundly anti-climactic.
Apparently Agent Coulson had known that, as he and his fellow ninjas--excuse her, S.H.I.E.L.D agents--had packed up her entire apartment and moved her to New York, into Jane’s apartment, apparently with Jane’s permission, by end of business on December 16. Of course, she was planning on doing roughly the same thing anyway, but her lease wasn’t up until January 31, which would have given her an extra six weeks or so to pack things the way she wanted. Or, okay, mess around on the internet and then throw everything in a bag at the last minute. Whichever.
They’d left her the whole weekend to get situated from her cross-country move. Generous of them, she supposed, because apparently she was starting work as the aforementioned office monkey on December 19.
"Do I get time to go visit my family for Christmas?" she asked Agent Coulson.
"How much time do you need?" he asked.
If she'd just looked at his face and listened to his voice, she might have thought she'd get away with asking not to start work until after January 1, but she knew better. "A long weekend?"
He nodded. "Be sure you finish the online classes for your rescue diver course before the in-water training starts."
"I . . . rescue diver?"
"Yes. It's the next step. You've already been certified in CPR and first aid, so you can go straight to the rescue-diving training. We've set you up for a private training date on December 28th."
". . . Okay."
* * *
Five months later, including multiple trips to the Florida Keys (apparently Tony Stark had a place there, too), Darcy YHGTBKM Lewis was a Master SCUBA Diver and qualified to teach Open Water Diving as well as a handful of specialities, including search-and-rescue, night diving, ice diving (Coulson had ordered it), deep diving, and cavern diving. She'd wanted to do some of the underwater photography-type courses, but Coulson said she'd have to pay for them on her own. Uh, no. Her salary wasn't that great, although her student loans had mysteriously disappeared.
Seriously, working for S.H.I.E.L.D. was the best job ever. She got paid to file and staple and once in a while throw together a slideshow presentation and, oh, right, also to become an expert in SCUBA diving. It was work, definitely, but if the office-monkey gig fell through the PADI instructor that the organization had kidnapped brought in said she could always come work for them. If they didn’t kill her first. It might be in the NDA; she wasn’t sure.
And then, on a Tuesday when she expected to scrub out the coffee pot and find some terrible clip-art to complement the completely-pointless transitions between slides, they threw her in the pool with Natasha Romanov and Clint Barton and expected her to teach them stuff.
She guessed she didn't need to teach anyone else how to dive as they had superpowers or mech suits that allowed them to do things like breathe underwater and see in the dark, but still. Natasha could kill her with her pinkies and not even break a sweat, and Clint could shoot her from the top of a building about ten miles away or something. This was going to end badly.
The problem was--well, there were a lot of problems. Problem Number One was that she would never, ever look like Natasha in a wetsuit and although she really desperately wished that didn't matter, it did. Sort of. No, it didn’t. Not a problem. Anyway.
So Problem Number One was what Clint looked like in a wetsuit. Okay, actually he was technically wearing a diveskin, not a wetsuit, but whatever she wanted to call it, it was black skintight Neoprene. He clearly wasn’t wearing anything under it and whoa boy was there a lot of him to see. Well, all right, that really wasn’t a problem either. That is, it wouldn’t be once she could get her goddamn libido in check.
That meant that Problem Number One was that she was fairly certain there was something going on between the two of them, even though Natasha was her usual cold professional perfect self and Clint gave no hint of it, either. Well, not that that was a problem, really. Everyone deserved to have someone, right? So she scratched that one, too.
Actualfacts Problem Number One was . . . well, there were so many other problems that she just shoved all of them in a mental box and slammed it shut. For now. She shook her head and returned her attention to the task at hand.
Which was teaching a pair of assassins an utterly useless skill.
"Why on earth do I need to teach the two of you how to SCUBA dive?" Darcy asked the ceiling.
"Director Fury suggested it," Natasha said, and Darcy rolled her eyes.
"Yeah, okay, I deserved that one," she said. "All right; you've both completed the online class, right? Then let's start with the equipment."
Problems are in a box, she reminded herself, especially after both of them had turned out to learn incredibly quickly and had done much better than she had done in her first, oh, three or four classes. It was annoying. Clint was from Iowa or some corn-filled state nowhere near the ocean, and Natasha . . . well, never mind. If Natasha hadn’t been perfect at it, Darcy would probably have been more surprised.
Still. She was a Master SCUBA Diver now, Darcy reminded herself. Master. Maybe she should have made them call her Master Lewis.
* * *
Darcy was running down a long hallway, being chased by the Destroyer, but instead of flames it was spitting out pixelated bombs or bullets or whatever they were from Space Invaders. Then, all of a sudden, it started singing . . . "Poker Face?"
Which, as soon as she managed to surface from sleep, she remembered was her ring tone for Agent Coulson. He’d found out about it more than once and had not been amused, ordering her to switch it to something else, but she always switched it back as soon as she could. She slapped her bedside table a few times, trying to find the phone, but apparently she'd used one the living room sockets to plug the charger in. She sat up and sighed.
Jane came in a moment later, wearing her bathrobe and fairly obviously nothing else under it, and held out Darcy's phone. "You got a call," she said. "Thor got a call, too. He, ah, left."
In other words, he'd probably jumped out of the window or something. "Thanks," Darcy said, and took the phone. One missed call, from Agent Ninja Coulson. She hit the button to call him back and waved at Jane, who was making 'I'm leaving now' gestures as she backed towards the door.
He answered on the second ring. "Ms. Lewis. Emergency. There will be a car out front for you in about two minutes." He hung up before she could say anything.
"Sure," she said to the dial tone, and hit the button to turn the screen off before she started digging through her floordrobe (what; she was going to un-fuck-up her room if she ever got a full weekend to herself) to find cleanish jeans and an appropriate shirt for the weather, whatever it was. This spring had been really weird, weather-wise, and it was best to be prepared for anything from ninety to snow. She looked out the window, and it wasn’t snowing, so she probably didn’t need a wool sweater, and opted for a sweatshirt she’d stolen from an ex-boyfriend, proclaiming her allegiance to some high school hockey team.
It occurred to her, as she shoved her hair into a ponytail, that she had no idea why an office monkey would be remotely useful at an emergency, but it didn't really matter.
The car was waiting at the curb when she got down to the street, maybe two and a half minutes after she left (look, bras with four hooks took a little longer than bras with only two hooks, all right?), and before she'd really managed to get situated in the back seat, the driver took off.
She fastened her seatbelt and then saw--wait, was that her rubberized drysuit? Hitting the button to talk to the driver, she said, "What's the drysuit for?"
The driver--she didn't recognize him but had early on in her employment decided all drivers were to be called Jeeves until told otherwise--gave her a look in the mirror, and said, dry as dust, "I expect you're supposed to be wearing it when we get to the building."
"What building?" And, for that matter, what call was there for a diver in a rubberized drysuit in a building?
"The one Loki set on fire."
Well, that cleared matters up, um, not at all. She sighed. "Okay. Don't look."
Jeeves rolled his eyes at her and angled the mirror a little farther up.
Whoever had put the drysuit in the back of the car had thoughtfully included the bathing suit--actually a triathlon suit, so it had a high neckline and short-length leg coverage and, thank God, a wonderful amount of rack support--she normally wore under diving suits. Not that, of course, she really wanted to struggle inside anything, let alone two skintight garments, in the back of a car driving erratically through New York, but she'd done stranger things. Maybe. At least the car had tinted windows.
She was still zipping up the drysuit and trying to get the cuffs to lay flat and not pinch her wrists when they got to the building, which wasn't on fire anymore. Darcy was, for just a moment, disappointed, but then she remembered that burning building meant people would probably get hurt.
Coulson was standing out front, probably directing all of traffic with just his eyebrows or something, but the moment he saw her, he pointed at another car, trunk open, that had, well, all of her SCUBA gear in it.
"What on earth am I supposed to do?" she asked as she hurried over to the car and started untangling hoses. "Wait, this isn't my mask." It was a full-face mask, which usually made her feel a little claustrophobic. No, cave-diving didn't make her feel claustrophobic. She never claimed to be consistent.
"Thor is stuck, probably in ice or somehow unconscious, in the basement of the building, which is flooded with water from the fire hoses. The firefighters are not prepared for underwater work and it will take a half hour or more for them to get someone here. Captain America's six-minute lung time isn't enough for him to get to where Thor is and back." Coulson stopped and took a breath. "We asked Clint and Natasha to suit up and get down there, but neither has a drysuit and Natasha told us that you’re the only one who’s trained to do this.”
Darcy listened, and nodded absently as she pulled on everything except the face mask, but then the words he was saying finally penetrated her brain or something and she almost dropped the mask. “Wait--you want me to haul ass down into a basement full of water and rescue a--”
Coulson slapped a hand over her mouth before she could finish the sentence, but after digging her nails into his wrist for a moment, she relaxed. There was no point in taking it too personally; he had a job to do. “Yes,” he said, taking his hand away. “Take this and put it on whatever is holding him in place, push the button, and get the hell out of there. He should be able to take care of the rest.” This was a silvery hockey-puck sort of thing with red lights in the middle that blinked.
“Okay,” she said, and pulled the mask over her head.
It was dark and disgusting and there were things floating in the water that she just didn’t want to think about, but there was Thor, in the back corner of the building, completely encased in ice, probably from Loki. Well, almost definitely from Loki, but she didn’t want to rule out other strange things happening. She’d worked for S.H.I.E.L.D. long enough to know not to do that. She put the hockey puck on a little shelf of ice next to his foot--it didn’t float, fortunately. She pushed the button and swam-walked away as fast as she could.
She bumped into a corner on her way up the stairs, but made it out and was yanking her fins off, hopping on one foot, when a watery-sounding boom happened. Spinning around, she stared at the building, holding her breath for a few seconds, until with a mighty roar, Thor appeared, with his hammer-thingy (it always made her want to quote Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog at him but she never did).
“WHERE DID HE GO?” he bellowed. “NEVER MIND, FOR I CAN HEAR THE BATTLE. AM I NEEDED HERE?”
Coulson shook his head, and Thor was off.
He was safe.
She’d saved him.
She, Darcy Lewis, B.A. in poli sci, office monkey to a group of ninjas and superheroes, and oh yeah, a master SCUBA diver, had just saved a fucking demigod from certain doom.
She had the best job ever.
(Also, she really needed a stiff drink.)