The Empath, Part II

Guys, be warned: I didn't mean for it to happen, but shit kinda got dark.

i

The next week passed in a blur. Jane and Darcy worked closely on the readings over the Bermuda Triangle (something seemed to be growing there, but what was the question), with Jane slowly beginning to realize that Darcy's scientific abilities far surpassed that of a clueless intern. ("Darcy," Jane had asked, blinking as she raised her head from the computer screen for the first time in five hours, "when—when did you learn calculus?" They'd been working on those equations for ten days.)

Just as the Stranger had promised, Darcy adjusted to her new powers. People settled down for the most part, no longer giving her a two-yard-wide berth in the hallways. And she found that, as people relaxed, her powers became less sensitive. Finally, things progressed until it seemed that either someone had to touch her or the emotions had to be unusually strong for her to pick up on them. She assumed this was why Bruce had been such a calming presence (until the incident in the lab); as a matter of national security, he was forced to always keep his emotions in check. She tried not to think too hard on that.

Similarly, she began to get the hang of keeping her own feelings in check rather than broadcasting them to everyone in the vicinity. She found that there was a near-physical sensation that accompanied the "satellite function," as she jokingly called it when she explained her powers to Jane. It was comparable to tingles on her skin.

"How does it work?" Jane asked cautiously but with barely-contained interest, trying to find the happy medium between the urgent scientific curiosity consuming her and her recognition that this was the personal bane of her best friend's existence. Darcy grinned at her over the table in their small shared kitchen—the Helicarrier was cool, yeah, but the quarters were generally a helluva lot smaller, including their battleship-style bunks—and launched into her explanation.

"Okay, so, it's like something is emanating from me—like the feeling you get when you project your voice. Like, if you couldn't hear your own voice, you'd still be able to feel the sound in your throat, right?"

Entirely absorbed with Darcy's explanation, Jane blindly stabbed for a cucumber in her salad and nearly missed her face as she tried to put it in her mouth. She nodded for Darcy to continue.

"I remember reading once that Helen Keller learned to speak basically by feeling her own throat from the outside and monitoring how the syllables felt in her mouth and vocal cords."

"So, you're trying to learn to feel how the emotions feel when they leave you—"

"So that I can stop them before they do!" Darcy snapped her fingers as she finished Jane's thought.

"I wonder what wavelength they operate on," Jane said, and her tone said her was already floating away as she considered it. Darcy grinned, watching her friend stare into space, surrounded by grey metal.

"I'll let you test me later, if you like."

Jane abruptly returned to reality, and her face said that nothing would make her happier. "It won't make you feel like a science experiment?" she tacked on, unsure.

Darcy snorted. "I mean, by definition I would be a science experiment, but that's not an unpleasant feeling if you're the scientist doing the experimenting."

This seemed to make Jane extremely happy, and that made Darcy equally happy. The astrophysicist stuffed another forkful of salad into her mouth in response.

Speaking around her food: "I'm so fucking proud of you."

This took Darcy completely off-guard, and she thought about deflecting from the compliment with a jokingly arrogant, "Well, duh." Instead, she opted for sincerity, because she truly hadn't expected Jane to say such a thing. "You—really?"

Jane nodded and swallowed, gazing down into her vinegar-doused greenery as if it held the secrets to the universe. "The way you've handled this…" Tears pooled on her lower lashline, but she seemed determined to finish what she was saying, and swatted Darcy's comforting hand away from her shoulder half-heartedly. "Darcy, you're the bravest person I've ever known. And the day you showed up in my trailer with a pot of coffee telling me you were the new intern was one of the best days of my life." Jane paused, thinking, then added on: "And I don't just mean that because your coffee is fucking amazing."

Apparently, the sincerity was short-lived because Darcy had to purse her lips to keep from laughing. "Uh, Jane, I hate to ruin the moment, but I'd been working for you for a week at that point. You just hadn't really noticed because Science!" The word was accompanied by Darcy's best jazz-hands. Mortification twisted Jane's expression, and she dropped her head into her hands, nearly face-planting into her salad.

"Oh my God, I'm the fucking worst," came her muffled groan. Darcy just snickered.

After a moment, a thought occurred to her. A much smarter voice in the back of her mind whispered that this thought was dangerous, but to no avail.

"Jane?"

Her boss groaned in response, still cocooned in her face-plant of shame.

"Can I experiment on you?"

At this, Jane raised her head warily. "If this is like that time I agreed to try your beef Wellington—" It wasn't that bad, Darcy nearly said, but decided to save that argument for another time.

"No, it's like the time you stayed up three days too long and hooked me up to a machine to see if I had any telekinetic abilities." For the record, the tests had been inconclusive. She'd been on less of a science bender than she'd been finding any science-adjacent reason to distract her from mourning the loss of her big, blonde boyfriend.

Jane's eyebrows furrowed. Apparently, recognizing that Darcy understood Jane's work didn't convince her that Darcy would ever be as obsessed with it as she was. "You want to conduct a science experiment?" she asked doubtfully.

"Really? We're calling that a science experiment?" Darcy questioned.

Jane decided to cut through the bullshit. "Darcy, really. What kind of experiment are we talking about here?" Suddenly unsure of herself, Darcy hesitated. Jane noticed, and her limitless loyalty reared its head. With determination: "How can I help?"

ii

"I really don't see why we had to be in the combat gym for this," Jane griped.

She looked decidedly uncomfortable, a scientist in a lab coat standing surrounded by workout gear of various purposes in the middle of an otherwise empty room.

"Because," Darcy responded, jumping back and forth on the toes of her sneakers for no reason other than to alleviate her own anxiety (that, and because it felt like the right thing to do in a gym setting), "I don't know how you're gonna react to this. And if it's really bad, I want there to be padding." She paused, surveying the room, covered in thin red cushion. "Like—everywhere."

Jane didn't look concerned. "C'mon, Darcy. I don't think it's going to be that intense. You said yourself that your powers have been fading over the past several days. For all we know, they're just going to wane until they disappear completely." If only, Darcy thought. But she hadn't been lying when she told the Stranger that she trusted him. And he'd told her in no uncertain terms that her powers were here to stay. So, she may as well flex her new muscles.

"Just brace yourself," she called out to Jane as she jogged to the other end of the massive room. They give us matchboxes for sleeping quarters but make the gym almost the length of the entire fucking Helicarrier, she grumbled to herself. How very government-chic.

"Why are you going all the way over there?" Jane yelled back, her voice becoming increasingly distant.

Darcy didn't answer. It was due only to the late hour—Jane had a tendency to work during the wee hours of the morning—that the gym was otherwise unoccupied. It was three a.m. And Darcy was convinced, even as she put more space between herself and Jane, that this was a monumentally bad idea. Her gut was never wrong—but she had to know. She had to know just what she was capable of.

"Okay," she whispered to herself, looking askance at her toes. She rested her hands on her hips, loose purple sweater hanging off one shoulder. Then, she turned back around to meet Jane's gaze, dozens of yards away. "Ready?" she shouted back to her boss.

"Ready for what?" was Jane's response.

"I'm not really sure," Darcy admitted quietly to herself.

And then she was focusing.

If there was anything she'd learned in her relatively unusual life, it was that there were three emotions above all that had the power to alter things significantly. The first was sorrow, which would not really work if she wanted to truly see the evidence. After all, if Jane broke down into tears, it would show that it'd worked, but it would hardly tell Darcy just how powerful that ability could be. The second was love, which posed a similar problem. If Darcy filled Jane with heaps of love, then it wasn't as if that would be measurable.

But the third emotion had potential, for two reasons. The first was that it was measurable—very measurable. And the second was that she knew if she was going to do this, she'd have to reach into her own storehouse of emotions to transfer to Jane. (That same cautioning voice in the back of Darcy's head grew louder, but she dismissed it. Knowing something is a bad idea and heeding that knowledge weren't the same thing. And sometimes bad ideas are necessary. At least, that's what Darcy told herself.)

There was only one emotion she could think of that she could conjure up unlimited quantities of, that she would be able to measure in Jane's response.

That emotion was anger.

Rage simmered beneath her skin. Darcy wasn't Bruce Banner; she didn't have anger on-call. But she did have several memories to aid her. She breathed deep and closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, she called a childhood image to mind. It was her stepfather's face.

"Anything?" she called out to Jane, eyes still shut.

"Nothing yet!"

Darcy nodded, and stepped two feet closer. She tried again. This time, she thought of his smug grin—she hated that grin.

"What about now?" she bit out.

"Sorry, Darce, nothing!"

Five more strides forward. She thought of his fist, skin split and bruised. Her breath was coming faster. Blood.

"Jane?" she snapped, feeling irritation ratcheting up dangerously in her chest. She tried to imagine Jane embodying that frustration. Split lip.

"I'd tell you if I felt anything!" Her friend answered defensively, but her voice belied no distress. A woman's pleading voice.

Losing patience, Darcy opened her eyes and strode forward twenty feet or so, gesturing around her as she ranted. "I don't fucking know what I'm doing wrong!"

"Please, Lonnie—no, just—no! Don't you fucking hit my daughter, I swear to Christ I will end you!" The voice ran shrill at the end.

Images flashed in her head, and she was heaving. But Darcy was too far gone. She was already seeing red, marching closer and closer to Jane's confused face.

"Darce…?"

The slap on Darcy's face, the way a slap stings and nearly burns. Her stepfather's drunken slur. Her stepbrother's brown eyes widening as he completely lost control.

Jane's disembodied voice, trembling: "Darcy, I think you need to stop."

She couldn't hear her. She could only hear her brother. "Get the fuck away from my sister."

There was a gasp. Darcy felt the cushion under her shoes, still striding forward, hands fisted, panting like a steed. Jane's voice was strangled. "Something's wrong—Darcy—Darcy, I don't feel right…"

And then the blood.

Suddenly, the anger dissipated, as if it had left her body completely. Darcy stumbled and nearly lost balance. It was as surreal and palpable a sensation as if the emotional load had been physically removed from her shoulders. No—not removed. It was like she'd strung an arrow on a bow and pulled it taut, and now the tension had been released. Released? she asked herself, dazed.

She'd released the arrow.

Oh, fuck.

Darcy's vision cleared just in time to see Jane charge her. That unbridled rage she had bottled and released was now inside Jane, as intense and unyielding as it had been the first time she'd seen it on her then-teenage stepbrother's face when she was ten, when he'd beat the living shit out of her drunkenly violent stepfather. Immediately, Darcy regretted not listening to the cautious voice in the back of her head. No fucking time for regret now, she realized. She knew she had to run, but she tripped on her own feet as she stumbled backward. Maybe I can reel it back in, maybe— But she knew, instinctually, that this had not been like a net she'd cast on Jane. This wasn't like the hospital room. This had been a transfer, one she didn't yet know how to drag back out of her friend. And Jane was already within reach.

Jane Foster's eyes were feral and unseeing as she threw herself on top of Darcy. "Jane—" she choked out, but Jane's hands were already around her throat. Jane was on top of her, and nothing in her expression told Darcy that she was in control of her actions. There was nothing in her face—no friendship, no love, no regret, no doubt—other than the rage that Darcy had artificially put there. She was seething. Terror seized Darcy. Her glasses were thrown off her face with the force of Jane's assault, rendering her half-blind. She was fucking helpless. She was fucking helpless and completely alone in an empty gym being strangled by her best friend—her best friend who wouldn't even realize what she was doing until it was over. And maybe even then it wouldn't be over. The horrifying thought occurred to Darcy that she well and truly had no idea if what she had just done was permanent. Oh my fucking God, I'm not just going to die, I've turned the world's foremost astrophysicist into an animalistic sociopath.

She couldn't push Jane off her, even as she tucked her knees up and pushed with the remnants of her dwindling strength. As it was, she distantly recognized that the emotional transfer had been physically draining. Even with the adrenaline rush now coursing through her, she was, at best, at half-strength. She winced, feeling her airway constrict tighter and tighter. And the only sound Jane was making was the intense inhale and exhale through her teeth, spit flying into Darcy's face.

The hopelessness of her situation hit. Darcy started to cry, tears rolling down the sides of her face, even as she lied to herself. Jane wouldn't kill me. Jane wouldn't kill me. She wouldn't. But she wasn't so sure of that anymore as black splotches began to take over her vision. Her eyes rolled upward, staring at the metal ceiling of the gym as her hands gripped Jane's wrists uselessly.

Like a Godsend, she suddenly felt multiple other beings in the room—emotional signatures, getting closer. And then the faces of Tony and Steve appeared over Jane's shoulders, ripping the scientist off Darcy. She screamed in response, and her nails scratched deeply into Darcy's neck as she was torn away. Darcy's mouth went wide, seeking air. Finally, it rushed in and the black spots began to ebb.

Above her, she heard Steve trying to bring Jane down, using his Captain voice, as he held her back by the waist. Rabid, she was still trying to wrench herself out of his grasp, her eyes wild and focused singularly on Darcy.

Tony came to kneel at her side. "Hey kid," he murmured. "It's alright. We've gotcha."

Darcy didn't feel alright. She felt fucking no where near anything resembling alright. She wheezed, her breathing sounding very much not normal. But she let Tony lay his hand on her back, absorbing the comfort he was offering her with his emotional presence. Concern spread from him—concern and affection. And fear, Darcy noted. But not, it seemed, fear of her. No. It was strong enough that she could sense where this emotion was directed. He was afraid for her. She swallowed, the action painful.

It seemed long minutes passed containing only the sounds of her own breathing, focused on the revolutions of Tony's hand on her back. And silently pleading. Pleading with God for Jane to be okay.

Slowly, she heard Jane come back to herself, and Darcy shuddered with relief.

"Oh my—oh my God," she sobbed. "Darcy—I…" And then Steve let her go, and the woman collapsed, breaking into ugly, swelling moans of emotional agony on the gym floor. Never in all the time that Darcy had known her had she seen Jane cry like this. Staring up at her, Darcy thought that the scene was nothing short of Biblical. And guilt sliced straight through Darcy's gut. Unforgivable, she thought to herself. That's what I've done. This was unforgivable.

"I'm sorry," Darcy croaked, shook her head and cleared her throat. She turned over on the ground and started to cough. "Jane, I'm so sorry," she tried again, "that I put you through that. I thought it might be bad—but I didn't think…" I didn't think I wouldn't be able to control it.

Leaning onto her forearms on the red padded floor, trying to take deep breaths, Darcy noticed a third interloper in her peripheral vision. He stood maybe thirty yards away, leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, face unreadable. It was undoubtedly Bruce—she knew as much even without her glasses on. And then he turned and left the way he came, not bothering to involve himself in the scene unfolding in the gym at three in the fucking morning on a secret government hovercraft.

"How did you know…?" Darcy asked, eyes still glued to the space where Bruce had been standing moments before.

It was Steve who answered. "Everyone on the floor above the gym felt it."

Darcy's eyes went wide. "The—the anger?"

Tony shook his head, still rubbing circles into her back. "Nah, kid, not the anger." He hesitated, then clarified: "Your fear. We all felt your fear."

iii

That night, Darcy dreamt. Laying in her bunk, she stared at the ceiling in the dark and cried soundlessly until sleep overtook her. And then dreams swarmed her unlike any she'd ever experienced.

There were screams. There were monsters, formless in their shape but terrifying in abstract concept. Deep, boiling fury permeated every corner of the darkened tunnels she was lost within. It was all sharply vivid yet indistinct in detail. She felt everything. And everything was constantly changing. Ruinous buildings, infected wounds. She was claustrophobic. She wanted to tear down every wall.

Rage and terror and self-hatred. They swam in her head like an overwhelming cologne, nearly suffocating her.

And then, like a bulldozer splintering the entire nightmarish construction, lust.

Astonishment reverberated throughout the dream as she saw herself wrapped in someone's arms. Her hair fell over her bare shoulders, her red-lipped smile meant for someone out of view. In her dreams, she saw calloused hands grip her thighs.

The intensity of the desire was only rivaled by the spike of guilt that accompanied it. This was desire of such proportions that Darcy had never felt before in her life. She could almost feel lips kissing away the scratches Jane had left behind on the skin of her throat, as if the owner of that mouth could heal her with his touch.

It was warm, all-encompassing, desperate—desperate to be understood. The lust morphed until it was a desire for something far less carnal, something that could be pure but was tainted by self-condemnation. White light glowed around her in her dreamscape, and the words I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry echoed all around her.

The apology was still on her lips, whispered over and over like a prayer, when she woke a scant three hours later.