Chapter Text
Steve had always known that he would be too late. Well—that wasn’t exactly true. One of the women his ma worked with at the hospital could tell him all about ‘too late;’ she’d met her Soulmate on the job, and the doctors hadn’t been able to save him.
Really, he was just being melodramatic when he thought that way. She wasn’t in danger, and she wasn’t rejecting him. She had children, yes, but she might be a widow, like his ma. Either way, she seemed to be willing to let him be a part of her life. And if she was married, or didn’t want to marry again, that would be all right. He could be a friend of the family. He could be Uncle Steve to the kids.
He’d like that, even if a part of him regretted that he might never be ‘Dad.’
Darcy hated being sick. She hated every cough, every sniffle, every headache, and every day spent in bed because it took too much energy to get up.
But even more than being sick, even more than the misery that was her sponsorship of tissue companies and Netflix, she hated missing work.
She hadn’t expected to love her job, or even to like it, really, but she did. She enjoyed looking after her scientists. She liked cooking for them, snarking with them, organizing them, and generally mothering them to within an inch of their lives. It was fun , but more than that, it was satisfying.
That she regularly got thank-you-for-keeping-Tony-alive presents from Pepper Potts (usually in the form of designer shoes, a spa day, tailored clothing, or a girls’ night out) was an added bonus.
Still, she wasn’t a workaholic, and none of these things, none of these perks, were the reason why she hated missing work.
No, she hated it because every time she got sick, or had a family emergency, or whatever , her scientists got into trouble. They stopped taking care of themselves; they did sleepy!science. They didn’t listen when people told them that their experiment/project was a Bad Idea, and so they went ahead and did it anyway.
It had gotten to the point that she rarely left town; if she absolutely had to, she kept the trip as short as possible and locked down the labs while she was gone. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do the same when she was sick, particularly since her illnesses tended to drag on. She’d tried just going in to work sick once, but somehow her germs had interacted with Bruce’s experiment; the result was an electrified goo monster, which had escaped the lab and started attacking Manhattan. (No one wanted to contemplate the fact that it was probably actually a booger monster, and Darcy really didn’t want to think about the Avengers assembling to literally fight her sinus infection.) (On the bright side, it was her shortest sick leave yet; things had cleared right up the moment the goo monster was defeated.)
After that, Darcy was not allowed near the labs when she was sick.
She only left her scientists unsupervised once.
Jane had opened a portal.
New York had not appreciated the live reenactment of Jurassic Park.
Darcy tried hiring a temporary babysitter.
The woman, who Darcy had thought had the nerves of steel required to deal with Tony, Bruce, and Jane, was a gibbering wreck after two days. There were three explosions in that time, and Tony had tried to build a telepathic coffee maker.
A telepathic coffee maker with lasers .
He’d made nearly twenty prototypes, and they’d all started attacking a visiting Steve Rogers when he said he didn’t want any coffee. (What he’d been thinking about the coffee makers was anyone’s guess.)
Next, she had tried leaving them in JARVIS’s capable (if virtual) hands.
Tony had recruited the AI, and they’d both helped Bruce make hulk kittens.
Actually, those hadn’t caused too much trouble. They were pretty adorable, in fact. But still. Hulk kittens . JARVIS totally should have put a stop to that.
This time, she’d just kept an eye on them via tablet, with JARVIS’s help. It mostly worked, but she was sleeping a lot, and they had no sleep schedule. They’d had a few close calls. But they had managed to avoid catastrophe. She’d thought—hoped—that they might make it through this illness without any major incidents. But the morning of what was supposed to be her first day back at work, she was woken not by her alarm clock, but by a mauve alert from JARVIS.
Darcy threw on some clothes and rushed to the labs.
She didn’t make it in time.
She could see it happening through the glass: Tony’s new PA was sprinting for the door; the latest intern had a deer-in-the-headlights look and was staring in shock at a smoking machine; Jane and Tony were yelling at each other, both trying to fix the machine and obviously disagreeing about how; and Bruce was slowly backing away from them. The thing started to glow, and Tony and Jane stopped yelling at each other as their efforts became frantic. The PA made it through the door, and Bruce turned towards the Hulk containment chamber. He’d barely taken two steps when a wave of energy rolled out of the machine, followed by a dense purple smoke.
The energy hit the glass. It cracked, but didn’t break; Darcy and the PA darted through the closest door, which led to another lab. “JARVIS, shield and vent Bruce’s lab, please, and keep that smoke quarantined.”
She watched the purple smoke begin to clear before sheets of metal slid down and blocked her view.
“Good job getting out of there,” Darcy said with a glance at the other woman. “Do you know what they were working on?”
She shook her head and sank onto the floor, breathing heavily.
Darcy returned her attention to the other lab. She could hear the energy bouncing around, first by the sound of cracking glass, then by sound of ringing metal, but each hit was quieter than the one before. It took time, more time than Darcy liked, but eventually the sounds stopped as energy dissipated entirely. The moment JARVIS gave her the all-clear, Darcy dashed across the hall and into Bruce’s lab.
The scene was… not what she was expecting. The knocked over instruments, the dented metal, the shattered remains of the glass wall… that was all there. She’d been prepared for the widespread destruction she found.
She was not prepared for two crying babies, one screaming toddler, and a child-sized Hulk throwing a temper-tantrum.
“You stop that right this instant, Bruce Banner!”
At the sound of her voice, all crying stopped.
The Hulk turned to her, eyes bright and happy; when he saw her, hands on her hips and glaring at him, he hung his head. “Sorry, Darcy.”
She relaxed. “You’re forgiven. Now, can you stay calm and help me, or do I need to send you to your room until you’re less green?”
He shuffled his feet. “Hulk help Darcy.”
She beamed at him. “Good!” She looked around the room. “Hm… Can you start picking up anything that got knocked over?”
The young Hulk—who was slightly taller than her—grinned and turned to the nearest table. With that situation under control, Darcy turned her attention to the babies.
Well, they weren’t newborns, at least. Darcy wasn’t a good judge of baby ages, but they were both sitting up and patiently looking at her. “Can you two understand me? How much do you remember?”
Baby Tony, who was noticeably bigger than Jane and well on his way to being a toddler, grinned at her in a way that just looked wrong on a baby’s face. When he spoke, it was in careful, deliberate sentences. “I wememba. You gon-na be my new mama, Deedee?”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Oh, why not. Sure, Tony, I’ll be your mother. It’s not like I don’t already feed you, keep you from getting yourself killed, and send you off for naptime.”
The smaller baby giggled and tried to speak, but all that emerged was mushy gibberish. She frowned.
“You understand and remember, Jane?”
She nodded distractedly, and started babbling to herself.
Darcy turned to the intern-turned-toddler and found that Tony’s most recent PA had followed her into the wrecked lab and was cuddling the little boy. She smiled.
“Natalie Brown, right?” She looked up and nodded. “Thanks for looking after… um…” Darcy tried frantically to remember the intern’s name.
“Jamie. His name is Jamie Murray.”
“Right! Jamie.” She turned her attention to the toddler. “You’re the one who always answers when I call Jane ‘Janie,’ right? Sorry I forgot, dude.”
“ That’s how you remember him?” Natalie sounded outraged.
Darcy tilted her head to the side. “Natalie, do you know how many interns we’ve had in the last six months? Sixteen . Jamie’s lasted longer than any of the others, but I’ve been out for the last two weeks, and he was only there for a week before that.”
“Um, uh, I don’t think that was me. I, uh, I just started yesterday.”
“Seriously?” Darcy shook her head. “Sorry I missed that. But, two Jamies in a row? Weird.”
“The girl before me was Erica.”
“I missed two interns? I have got to stop getting sick.”
There was a soft thump, and Darcy turned to see a small Bruce Banner sitting on the ground. “Darthy?”
She refrained from aw-ing or rushing over to pinch his cheeks or hug him, but it was a close thing. Mini-Bruce was adorable. He looked like he was five or six years old; as if the messy curls and soft lisp weren’t enough, he was rubbing his eyes and yawning, all while drowning in the white fabric of his adult-sized lab coat.
“Careful of the glass, sweetheart,” she said, the endearment slipping out unintentionally. “Oh—sorry, Bruce. You’re kind of adorable right now.”
He blushed and ducked his head, but smiled shyly at her. “Ith okay. I don’t mind.”
This time she did let out an “aw…” but she wasn’t the only one; Natalie was right there with her.
He blushed even more, but before they could embarrass him further, Jamie yelped. Darcy spun around to find him sitting on the ground, staring in shock at the glass and blood on the bottom of his foot.
“Okay!” she said quickly. “Time to get the little, shoeless kids away from the broken glass.”