Chapter Text
Darcy was beginning to get very tired of running around after genius scientists.
“I’m lending you to Betty,” Jane had said, just as if Darcy was a piece of lab equipment.
“It’ll be nice to work with someone sane for a change,” Darcy had said tartly, but really, what difference did it make? She was never going to be more than someone’s assistant. She’d fallen into this crowd of super-scientists and superheroes by accident. All she had to offer was her ability to take orders well.
Dr. Betty Ross had the reputation for being calm and reasonable - she was the Hulk’s girlfriend for god’s sake - but today she was just as excitable and incomprehensible as Jane, and had dragged Darcy out to some field. Darcy squinted through the early morning mist at the white lab-coated figure hurrying across the grass, looking at an instrument in her hand. As Darcy trudged after her, she spotted Betty’s latex gloves on the ground, and scooped them up. Picking up after absent-minded scientists: Darcy’s life’s work.
“Dr. Ross,” Darcy called, but the white figure in the mist didn’t stop. The sun through the mist blurred Betty’s form until it looked like she had rabbit ears. Darcy grinned at the thought, and jogged after her. Between one blink and the next, though, Betty vanished.
Darcy ran faster, thinking about wormholes and magic portals and that bridge-thing that Thor uses. Shit, she’d have to explain to freaking Bruce Banner that she let something happen to his girlfriend and oops…
Darcy was falling, and then she landed on a pile of dry leaves at the bottom of a pit.
“Well, fuck,” she said.
There was no sign of Betty, but there was a tunnel.
“Naturally,” Darcy said, “if she fell down here she wouldn’t wait for me, or call out. Naturally she’d go exploring.” Scientists. She sighed, and took her cell phone out. No bars. Of course. She looked up. Too far to climb out, and no handholds. “Okay, tunnel it is, then.”
The tunnel was creepy and dark, but not long. At the end of it was a room with lots of doors. Darcy walked around trying them all, and quickly discovered they were all locked. Could Jane have gone through and locked one behind her? There was a table in the center of the room with a key on it. Darcy tried the key in each door. The key opened a useless little door the size of a cat flap. She slammed it shut again. “For fuck’s sake.”
When she turned around, a bottle had appeared on the table. A note attached to it said, “Drink Me.”
“Yeah, right,” Darcy said. She patted her pockets and pulled out a lock picking kit. “Times like this I am glad I’ve been buddying up to Natasha.” She chose a human sized door at random, picked the lock, and went through.
She was outside again, but not in the misty meadow where she and Betty had been. It was a forest of gigantic trees and huge mushrooms. Weird. She paused. Maybe she should go and try another door.
A cloud of smoke drifted from behind one of the trees. Darcy caught a whiff of pot. She went around the tree to have a look, and jumped back in alarm.
It was the freaking Winter Soldier. At least, it was this dude with a metal arm and a pony tail, but he had some fake antennae on his head. He was lounging on a mushroom the size of a queen mattress and smoking a joint.
“Hey,” he said.
“Um, hi,” Darcy said. He didn’t seem like he was about to kill her. “Do you know where we are?”
“Kid, I’m not even sure what I’m smoking, but I don’t give a shit. I haven’t been this relaxed in decades.”
Yay for pot. Pot was probably saving Darcy’s life right now. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen Betty come by? Dr. Ross?”
“Nope.” He flopped on his back and looked up at the treetops. “These trees are really amazing.”
“Right.” Darcy backed away. “You just, ah, carry on.” She spotted a path, and hurried away before the Winter Soldier’s mellow mood shifted.
As she’d hoped, the path led her out of the forest. Darcy checked her cell again, but still zero bars. Where the fuck was she? She was going to give Stark so much hell about his phone’s “universal coverage.”
An old-fashioned cottage stood a bit away from the forest’s edge. Maybe a place like that would have a land line. She went up to the door to knock. Inside she heard crashes, and voices screaming. Wait, that sounded like…
“Jane?” What on earth was Jane doing here? Maybe Betty had already called for help, and Jane had come to get them.
There was another crash, and Jane shouted something. Darcy whipped the door open, and was almost hit by a flying saucer. Literally, the kind that goes under a teacup. The porcelain saucer smashed on the path behind her. She stepped cautiously into the room.
Jane was there all right, dressed in a frilly apron and a - chef’s hat? She was screaming and throwing things at a woman in a rocking chair holding a wailing baby.
“Jane!” Darcy ran up to her. “Stop it, you’ll hit the baby!”
Jane waved a gigantic pepper grinder threateningly. Darcy looked at the woman she was threatening. She looked familiar, but Darcy couldn’t place her. The woman smiled mysteriously, and sang some weird lullaby to her baby. Jane snatched up a saucepan and flung it at them.
“Jane, what’s the matter with you!” Darcy tried to grab her arm.
“That so-called Duchess is Loki, that’s what!” Jane swung the pepper grinder, puffing a cloud of pepper into the air.
Through her sneezes, Darcy looked at the woman’s black hair and smirk. “Oh my god.”
The baby started to alternate sneezes with his cries, and Duchess Loki turned him over to spank him, keeping time with the lullaby.
Darcy had never considered herself maternal, but leaving a baby in Loki’s hands just seemed impossible. “Stop it! Give me that baby.” She held her arms out demandingly.
Duchess Loki tossed the child to her as if it were a pillow. “I must go and get ready to play croquet with the Queen,” she said. Cook Jane threw a frying pan at Loki’s head, narrowly missing as the Duchess sauntered out of the room.
“Jane, what the hell is going on?” Darcy demanded, rocking the shrieking baby.
Jane waved the pepper grinder again, apparently beyond words.
“Give her some space,” said Natasha’s calm voice. Darcy jumped, not having noticed she was there.
Natasha uncurled herself from where she had been napping on the hearth. She was dressed for a mission, except she had little cat ears on her head, and was smiling an enigmatic smile.
“Take the baby for a walk,” Natasha suggested. “Let Jane cool off.”
Darcy looked at the incoherent Jane slamming pots and pans around, and nodded.
Outside, she followed the path away from the forest, and the baby’s cries and sneezes gradually calmed into grunts. Darcy didn’t know much about babies. What did grunts mean?
“And when did babysitting get added to my job description?” she grumbled. She stopped to take a good look at the baby. “If you need changing, I’m taking you right back to…”
She was holding a piglet.
“When did this happen?” she demanded.
The piglet struggled. She tried to free it from the baby clothes, but finally had to let it go. The piglet trotted off still wearing the baby’s bonnet.
“Fucking Loki,” she said.
Darcy figured it hadn’t been quite long enough for Jane to calm down, so she continued on the path. A minute later, there was Natasha up in a tree.
“How the hell did you get here so fast?” Darcy asked.
Natasha’s smile grew wider.
Darcy tried another question. “Which way should I go?”
“Where do you want to get to?”
“Fuck if I know.”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Well, have you seen Betty?”
“No, but there’s a couple of mad scientists that way.”
“I don’t want to collect any more.”
“It’s true, there are an awful lot of mad scientists here.” Natasha vanished into the tree.
“How the hell does she do that?” Darcy headed the direction that Natasha had pointed. Maybe the mad scientists could help find Betty.
In about two minutes, Natasha appeared in another tree, magically ahead of Darcy again. “What became of the baby, by the way?”
“Turned into a pig,” Darcy said, trying to sound as if that happened all the time.
“Fucking Loki,” said Natasha.
“Right?”
Natasha disappeared, and Darcy continued on her way. She almost wasn’t surprised when Natasha showed up a third time and asked, “Did you say pig, or fig?”
“I said pig,” Darcy said, “and now you’re just showing off.”
Natasha smiled brilliantly, and somehow managed to disappear while leaving the impression of the smile behind her.
“How the hell does she do that?” Darcy asked the air, in a resigned voice.