Authoress's Note: This story is written in the 3rd person. I only wrote the Intro in 2nd/1st person because it seemed to fit. I wanted this moment to be from Darcy's direct perspective, but from Chapter II onward, it's all 3rd person, baby.

Also, be advised, ya'll: if you came for Darcy/Bruce, this shit is SLOOOOWburn. I like there to be a good lead-in. Alright. Advisories all done. Enjoy.

Imagine being the most brilliant person in all of your classes. Seriously. You're so freaking smart that you graduate high school early, then get your AA early despite having triple majored because everything and its brother interests you. Imagine that people always underestimated you because you're perky and snarky and sort of look maybe a little like a slacker because you like to wear knit things and you cuss more often than actually putting your extensive used-to-read-the-dictionary-for-fun-when-I-was-bored-as-a-kid vocabulary to use.

Imagine for a moment that you have a mind that can get so damn bored so damn easy that you once learned to play the piano one week, dropped it, picked up the cello, dropped it, picked up the oboe, dropped it, and could still play all three well enough to half-ass your way into a music scholarship. Imagine that you're so desperate for mental stimulation that you invented a drinking game called strip-Sudoku and wrote a rulebook for it so you could teach it to the stoner friends who copied your grades. Imagine that this same antsy cerebral impulsiveness led you to decide, on an absolute whim with no forethought whatsoever, to sign up for a fucking astrophysics internship.

Because, here's the deal: That girl? Yeah, that's me. And when I signed up to be Jane Foster's assistant/intern/whatever—after passing a flyer in my university hallway and thinking "astrophysics sounds fun"—I most certainly was not signing up to be involved in an interplanetary government conspiracy that included alien robots, Norse gods, and the ubiquitous men in black.

I was signing up to learn how to use fancy telescopes and talk jargon and…okay, maybe I had no idea what astrophysics actually involved, but I was doing a damn good job as an intern up until the freaking GOD OF THUNDER fell from the sky.

Then my life turned into this. Sitting in a small white room with Jane digging a trench into the floor with her pacing while I tried to remember the finger patterns to Bach's Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor. The dull echo of a sterile government "debriefing" (interrogation) room. The tiny camera up in the top right corner of the box we occupied, blinking as it zooms in on my face.

This. This is my fucking life.

I sighed. Jane was worrying her lip with her teeth as she glanced at me, but I flashed her a Darcy-smile. The kind with teeth and dimples that said "Buck up, pal! This is a walk in the park! Nobody is going to get their brains washed today!" Jane visibly relaxed and continued her incessant pacing. And I went back to playing the oboe in my head and twitching my fingers to keep from imagining what they might accomplish by murdering us, memory wiping us, or employing an experimental form of vivisection. Jane made another round and I grinned again, this time offering a double thumbs-up.

The door slammed open. We both jumped and I nearly fell off the uncomfortable white chair my derriere was occupying. Two suits walked in, followed quickly by a man who honest-to-Norse-gods was wearing a leather duster, a turtleneck, and an eyepatch.

"Where's the fluffy white cat? You can't reveal your evil plan without him." Damn word vomit.

He was nonplussed. In fact, hitting the same button I'd become sensitive to through the years, he just straight up ignored my presence. His eyes—eye, sorry—didn't waver from Jane as he asked, voice hard and condescending as if those were permanent characteristics of his personality:

"I take it you want to know if Thor is alive?"

Jane nodded vehemently.

"He's fine."

Jane's shoulders fell, her body going lax after so many hours of worrying for his life. She'd seen his very public display of heroism smeared across every news channel for all of one minute before she'd lost her cool and called the number Agent Coulson had provided her. They'd picked us up, shipped us to a "secure location" and firmly told us to wait. Wait, they told us, as New York City was crumbling.

And apparently what we'd waited for was all of thirteen words from a Bond villain. He turned on his heel and was walking out.

This was so not going to fly.

"Um, excuse me, but what happens now?"

Finally, he deigned to glance over his leather-clad shoulder. He raised an eyebrow over his unseeing eye.

"Who the hell are you?"

I laughed lightly, but it sounded confrontational in a sarcastic sort of way. "I'm the intern."

"Dr. Foster, do you need an intern?"

The fuck did that mean?!

Jane looked startled and rushed to insist, that yes, she definitely needed her intern.

Dr. No seemed to chew on that a moment, then he replied, "Too bad," and stalked out the door.

As the door shut behind the suits, I asked aloud to no one, "Too bad as in 'too bad, so sad, we're gonna' kill her anyway'? Or too bad as in 'too bad you'll have to work with her, that one annoys me'?" I couldn't help that my voice sounded disinterested. I drawled the words but my eyes were wide and I was legit concerned. Thankfully, it seemed Jane recognized I was actually fearing for my life. She opened her mouth, it seemed, to comfort me, but nothing came out. Jane shook her head dumbly, still staring at the closed door. She tried again:

"I…don't know."

Then the door opened again and we repeated the startled act. This time, Agent Coulson strolled in, looking amiable and smug as ever.

"Dr. Foster, Ms. Lewis!" he offered jovially, as if we hadn't just been trapped in a box for ten hours with supervised pee breaks then scared shitless by a taciturn PETA target. He took off his sunglasses with one hand and pocketed them smoothly. "Congratulations!" Jane and I shared a look—hers perplexed and mine full of dread. Coulson grinned at us, spreading his hands out in a gesture of warm welcome. "You're hired!"