SOMETHING JUST LIKE THIS
Extended Summary:
Darcy Lewis's life was pretty extraordinary, and that was *before* she ended up on friendly terms with the Avengers and became somewhat of a lab rat for testing out their various devices and experiments. After a simple 'trust me on this' from her friend Tony Stark, Darcy found herself in the 1940's having to rely on Tony's playboy father of all people to get back home.
With the bittersweet knowledge that James Barnes would be long dead in her own time, Darcy forged a friendship that she knew couldn't last long, but it was the unexpected realization of who both of the Stark men were and would be in her life that truly shook her.
This is a story about perspectives. It's a story about love, fate, what's set in stone, and what it means to change.
Notes:
I would be lying if I said I wasn't inspired by the other Darcy/Howard stories with a similar premise on AO3. In coming up with this story, I wanted to take that inspiration and turn it into something that really examined three main aspects of the plotline.
Firstly, I want to experience the fun of Darcy's realization that she is Tony's mother at a point when she still sees Howard as a one-dimensional person she's not entirely fond of.
Secondly, I want to portray a time at rest at the most tumultuous period in both Darcy and Tony's lives, when they're both aware of who they are, how they're related, and how they grapple with wanting the very best for each other.
Thirdly, with both hope and a bittersweet dose of reality, how Howard and Darcy's relationship can and can not be altered for Tony, and how it can be understood.
My plan for this story does involve a happy ending, and I don't intend to skimp on the romance. However, there's a lot of feels here, and a lot of them are, as I already hinted, bittersweet. To balance that, I plan to have enough of a story arc in Parts I and II that folks who don't want to explore that third, more angsty section can skip it and still feel satisfied.
Part I: Fight Club
She said "Where d'you want to go?"
"How much you wanna risk?"
I'm not looking for somebody with some superhuman gifts
Some superhero, some fairytale bliss
Just something I can turn to
Somebody I can kiss
I want something just like this
-Something Just Like This, Coldplay
Chapter One: A Distinct Lack of Ceiling Cages
Darcy Lewis was something of a fatalist. She always had been, and this feeling that she was moved by the hand of fate had never seemed more certain than in the moment after she'd used electricity to fell the God of Thunder. That Thor called her his 'lightning sister' when he saw her gave her the same sort of thrill as she'd had the night it happened. Certain events in her life simply rang like bells in her mind, as if she should expect that on the last day of her life, their melody would play in order, finally recognizable and complete. That moment had certainly been one of them.
On the day that she and Jane moved into the repaired Avengers Tower, Darcy made an agreement to herself that she would not examine how often those 'bell ringing' moments were happening as any kind of indicator for how long she had left to live, because those moments? They were coming on thick and fast, lately.
There were other moments that, however extraordinary, were just part of how crazy her life was, now.
That first night in the tower found Darcy bursting with energy and no Jane Foster to talk to. Jane had fallen asleep almost as soon as she'd picked which bedroom she would be claiming, which probably made sense given how late she'd been up packing the night before. Still, it was only ten at night and Darcy had only seen roughly one percent of her new home, and that would just not do.
At first, Darcy walked close to the wall, making note of the way the hallway angled around. The hallway was narrow along the inside where it was lined with apartment doors, the hallway dead-ending at a mirror that Darcy suspected might be a disguised door. Darcy followed the decorative carpet from the mirror, walking beside the doors that led to each suite. She saw that after about ten doors, the curve of the wall grew more broad and the spiral theme from the carpet was reinforced by an impressive picture window. The individual panes grew taller as the hallway widened into the common area. The custom-cut glass alone looked like it cost more than any apartment building Darcy had ever lived in. A phrase from Jurassic Park echoed in her head as Darcy walked into the communal space.
'Spared no expense!'
The windows that had started as a small decorative element in the closed-off hallway grew into floor to ceiling windows which curved around the common area and looked out on New York City. The same spiral theme was reflected in the open plan of the room, with a uniquely shaped (and frankly gigantic) teardrop island in the kitchen and a dining area with curvy chandeliers so gorgeously crafted they probably could have easily been featured in an architectural museum. The massive television was accompanied by a spiral shaped couch that would have looked stupid on a website or diagram but fit perfectly in the strangely beautiful room. The overall effect was incredible, and Darcy figured it would look even nicer in daylight. As nice as everything looked, it didn't satisfy her curiosity about the rest of the building, so she turned around and headed back into the narrow hallway.
After Darcy had ridden the elevator on the way up the first time and looked out one of the windows in their room, she had seen that their residential floor was quite high in the building. The rooms she shared with Jane were on the highest floor accessible via that elevator, even- but Darcy wasn't an avid reader of spy novels and comic books for nothing. There were floors above her, and she wanted to snoop in them.
On her second pass, she saw one door that looked different from the other suite doors, and when she turned the knob, it opened out into a staircase.
"Is it weird to say I wouldn't mind evacuating down these suckers, if I had to?" Darcy said aloud. There was a comfy odd rubbery fabric on the stairs that muffled sound and softened her footfalls.
They also went up, whereas the elevator… did not.
There were three more floors that the stairs led to, but the doors for the top two were locked, complete with blinking red lights on their access panels. Darcy didn't bother touching them. When she went back down to the floor that wasn't locked, she didn't pause before walking straight through the door.
This floor was more utilitarian. It was also empty. The sparsely scattered doors were all fitted with locks, some more impressive than others, but the latches weren't engaged, and they guarded empty rooms. She was just starting to feel bored with the monotony of checking each room when she found something unexpected inside one of them: a staircase.
These stairs weren't covered with the special comfort stuff, and there were two landings of eleven stairs each before she reached the top of it. The final four steps led to an arch that opened up into a hallway, with a door at the end of it that looked straight out of the Avengers spy television series.
So naturally, Darcy walked up to it.
There was a hand plate beside the door, and Darcy couldn't help but think about the day full of paperwork and fingerprint scanners that she and Jane had gone through in order to get permission to live and work there. She knew that there was no way that Iron Man's hidden Avengers Squared lab would open up to her handprint, but what was she going to do, leave? A few seconds after she placed her hand on the scanner, she heard the unmistakable voice of Stark's robot butler speaking on the other side of the door.
"Sir, someone is at the door. The readout of their credentials should appear on your tablet."
"Is there really? Hell, even I barely remembered this lab exists. This I gotta see!"
Darcy took her split second of warning evaluate her options. Standing there like a confident but completely idiotic person had its charms, but she totally wanted to know if a force field or a metal gate would come sliding down from the ceiling if she pulled her hand away and started back toward the stairs. That would be quite a sight to see, and had the added benefit of showing that she had an inkling of how much she was Not Authorized To Be There.
On the other hand, the very fact that she could hear anything that happened on the other side of the door might mean that, despite Stark's presence there, despite the hand scanner, maybe that room wasn't a Super Death Imminent kind of secret?
She decided that the possibility of a ceiling cage was cooler in more ways than one. Darcy turned away and started to power walk toward the stairs.
Behind her, the door opened, but Darcy didn't let her steps falter. Confidence was key.
"The stairway door locks from this side, I think," Tony Stark said in a casual tone of voice. "The handprint scanner unlocks it, unless you aren't authorized, of course."
Darcy almost stopped, but managed to keep up her strides until she reached the top of the stairs. Without turning around, she spoke, rolling her eyes at herself after hearing the tremor of fear in her voice.
"That makes perfect sense, thank you. Could you just pop your hand onto the scanner so I can get out of your hair, please?"
The silence between them was an oppressive thing. Darcy was mentally filing paperwork to assign it its own zip code by the time he spoke again.
"I could," Stark said. "But I would rather know who would be escaping my clutches beforehand."
Darcy couldn't stop herself from whirling around. "Okay, 'clutches?!' Is that terminology something you gain access to with the whole superhero thing, or is it more of a personal vocabulary choice? Wait, never mind," she said, putting up a 'stop' hand as she shook her head. "What am I even saying? It's clearly an ego thing. I bet you used 'clutches' before you even started puberty."
She finally let herself look in Stark's direction, but Darcy wasn't prepared for what she saw. He was wearing grimy coveralls, and the tips of his fingers sported dark stains that she recognized as the product of some serious mechanical work. Seeing a rich playboy type without his snazzy suit wasn't what shocked her, though. What shocked her was his expression.
Darcy was used to turning heads. Even in her least revealing clothes, her body was just noticeable, and she'd made her peace with that. So 'stunned by the boobs' face was something she'd come to accept and mostly tune out, especially when meeting a guy for the first time. She thought of it as her little gift to the male half of the population— the first ogle was usually free.
Stark was not making any of the standard faces, though. He looked stunned, his gaze tracing over her repeatedly, as if disbelieving what he was seeing.
"Starting to freak me out a bit there, Iron Man," Darcy said after a full ninety seconds of uncomfortable staring. "If you're upset about the security breach, you should know I've been in this tower for less than six hours, and I could adequately describe my path up here as 'meandering.'"
Stark blinked at her, his head tipping sideways as if he'd italicized his incredulity. "That's not it. You're surprising in many ways, honestly," he said, his eyebrows shooting skyward as he nodded at her flip flops. "You actually reminded me of someone," he added. With a shake of his head as if he were trying to re-orient himself to his surroundings, Stark said, "Forget it."
Since it didn't look like she was going to get in trouble for snooping around after all, Darcy felt a bit more comfortable. "The whole 'this door is super ordinary and like all the others, you don't have to even bother looking inside' approach probably works with almost everyone," she said reassuringly. "It took a nosy lab assistant with insomnia to really push back. I'd say security for this place is fine, except—"
Stark crossed his arms, a kind of challenge shining in his eyes. "Go on?"
"Well," Darcy crossed her own arms. The distance between them didn't make her feel as diminutive as she ordinarily would in this situation. "You say the wall panel unlocks the stair door, but that's bluster, right? Because I didn't see an intercom. You're going to end up with nosy employees starving to death in your secret stairway if you don't come here all that often. That's not a great look."
"It was bluster," Stark admitted with a grin.
"Damn, I'm usually good at figuring that shit out. You got me," Darcy said, pointing at him.
"So, lab assistant, that means Foster's lackey, right?" he asked.
Darcy was getting tired of talking to someone with a freeway's width of space between them, but she just had this sense that walking over toward Tony Stark would be some kind of victory for him, so she shifted her weight from one foot to another and answered him without moving closer. "Yep."
"Are you a physics grad student?" he said dubiously.
"Why, don't I look like one?" she challenged.
Stark tipped his head to the other side this time. "I'm pretty sure I'm the name on your checks, I'm not going to answer that one, Ms. Curie." He tapped a few things on the tablet in his hands (which was thinner and sleeker looking than any Stark tech she'd seen in stores, Darcy noticed) and nodded at her. "You're good to skedaddle."
"A Captain America word and no sexual harrassment?" Darcy said in a shocked voice. "Mister Stark, you need to get some sleep."
"I concur with Miss Lewis, Sir," the British-voiced AI broke in. "You have been awake for thirty-five hours and nineteen minutes. In eleven minutes, I will be giving you a thirty minute warning before Ms. Potts' Contingency Plan will go into effect."
"Wow, you wrote an AI that can infer capitalization?" Darcy asked Tony Stark. Her snark was slightly dampened by the fact that she let out a huge yawn right after speaking.
"Do you want to starve in the stairwell or not?" Stark asked her, his voice colored by a bit of pride along with irritation.
"Don't worry, I'm skedaddling. You do know that only psychopaths aren't affected by the sympathetic yawn reflex, though, right?" Darcy said, starting down the stairs.
The longer it took for him to say something back to her, the more her expectation grew, but Darcy ended up with the last word. She had to hand it to Stark, though- no retort was almost more disturbing than anything he could have said.
oOoOoOoOo
Over the next week, Darcy split her time between helping Jane set things up the way she wanted them in her brand new lab (85%), settling both of their belongings into the amazing apartment suite Tony had given them to live in (10%), and trying to get herself killed by an Avenger (5%).
It wasn't really her fault. There were things that were just common knowledge around the tower, things like 'just because Doctor Banner likes to drink coffee and talk excitedly with Jane four days in a row doesn't mean he's going to expect you to hand him his coffee on the fifth day.' Most of the coffee had landed on Darcy, not Banner, and he hadn't hulked out even a little bit, but it was still a bad impression, and Darcy knew she wanted to make up for it somehow.
She'd changed her clothes and put the last of their things away to give the two PhDs enough time to chat without the stress of Darcy's presence. Then she'd taken some time to take stock of the communal kitchen. To her surprise and delight, there was a reasonable split between hippy dippy ingredients that made her eyes roll (dried Kaffir lime leaves? Tasmanian Pepperberry?) and standard baking ingredients like flour and brown sugar. She made some notes and headed out to buy the rest of what she needed. On the way back, Darcy picked up some takeout and dropped it off for Jane. As much as she'd been hoping to talk with her while they both ate, Jane had her 'Manic Edging' look on, the one where she could be tipped over into an explosion of explanation of what she'd been working on (or worse, what she wanted to be working on, sometimes) that made Darcy despair of ever being a well-rounded, interesting person in comparison.
She was still munching on her last bite of kebab when she walked through the hallway toward their apartment and saw, in the mirror at the end of the hallway, something drop out of the ceiling behind her.
Darcy spun around and threw her hands up to protect herself, launching her kebab stick, her fountain drink, and her bag of icing sugar and food coloring out with them. The drink moved the fastest, spinning and somehow keeping its lid on until it landed with a splash on the intruder. The grocery bag, weighted down by the food coloring, fell away from the sugar bag, which, in an action that made the concept of probability weep, collided with the kebab stick and burst open spectacularly.
That was how, in a matter of sixty seconds, Darcy Lewis found herself facing a sticky, sugar-coated Clint Barton, directly in front of Natasha Romanoff's apartment door.
"Wow, on a scale of mostly dead to utter toast, how fucked am I right now?" Darcy said, her eyes wide.
Beside them, the Black Widow's door opened, because of course it did.
oOoOoOo
Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, had a habit of traveling through the tower in the air ducts, which was something Darcy simultaneously thought made perfect sense and sounded like something someone would make up to make themselves sound cool. The fact that this fact had been explained to her by Natasha Romanoff in an exasperated tone that, unbelievably, was directed at Hawkeye at the time was incredibly encouraging to Darcy in that moment. The second unbelievable thing (third, really. Darcy was certain she could spend the rest of her life tossing bags of sugar and never get that same result, not in fifty years of trying) was that, as soon as the Black Widow's eyes had lit on the entire scene, the man covered in sugar was the one spluttering apologies and explanations.
Thankfully it hadn't taken much convincing on either Darcy or Romanoff's part to persuade him to go clean himself up. At that point, right before Darcy was about to explain her part in the whole thing, Romanoff had held up a single, trembling finger.
Then she'd started laughing so hard that Darcy couldn't help but join in. They laughed for a few minutes straight, regaining their composure and then completely losing it again when they both noticed the crime scene of perfectly formed footprints surrounded by icing sugar on the carpet. He'd dusted himself off as best he could while standing still. A few photographs later, Darcy and the Black Widow had trauma-bonded.
"The worst part is," Darcy said, when she finally had control over her voice again. "I'd bought that to make cookies to apologize to the Doctor Banner for spilling coffee on him and thank him for not hulking out as a result. Now I'm going to need two bags!"
oOoOoOo
Nearly aerosolized icing sugar combined with carbonated soda had the potential to solidify into a substance remarkably like concrete, it turned out.
oOoOoOo
Baking happened the next day, which was a Saturday. That meant that Darcy had been living in Avengers tower for a full week, and she'd managed to nearly die twice, or three times if you counted snooping outside the door of Tony Stark's hidden lab of potential stairway death.
As she decorated the circle-cut cookies with long arrows and big Hulk fists (which didn't look great, but hopefully Banner would appreciate the thought, because the alternative was to try to make faces), Darcy considered making a few look like Stark's arc reactor, but decided against it. She hadn't felt threatened enough to warrant Apology Cookies, and Stark had been MIA since their strange encounter, anyway.
She hadn't expected to have to guard the cookies as they cooled further and the icing set, but Darcy had guessed by the fact that the cookie sheets were still shrink-wrapped that baking wasn't a tradition. Yet. By the time they were ready to be eaten, the kitchen island had almost a full complement of Avengers. Captain Rogers, Natasha Romanoff (who was still going to be called Ms. Romanoff out loud, because laugh riot or not, respect was respect), Doctor Banner, Hawkeye, and Jane all joked and laughed with each other and Darcy.
"All right, I give. No one has even tried to steal a cookie and yet I've been living in vigilant fear ever since I laid them on the racks. I can't take it anymore, have at them!" Darcy told the group.
One by one, her cookies were lifted, examined, and tasted, and to her relief, everyone seemed to be pleased with her offering. The slow grin that grew on Barton's face after his first bite of an arrow cookie had been very gratifying.
"Come. Sit," he told her, walking over to the couch and pointing at the space beside him. Within twenty minutes, Darcy was on a first-name basis with Clint, whose descriptions of how much he liked this iteration of icing sugar better than the kind he'd had to shower off of himself verged on the indecent.
"I'm gonna assume that these are delicious, because someone clearly ate all of the Iron Man ones first," Stark declared, walking into the room with the casual confidence of a man who'd built the entire building.
"I didn't even know you were in town," Banner said.
"Oh, I didn't nearly kill you or get killed, so I didn't make any Iron Man ones," Darcy said around a too-large bite of a Hawkeye cookie. "Don't worry, I'm sure it'll happen."
"Given the look on your face when I came out of my apartment, I think at least one of those should be a Black Widow cookie," Ms. Romanoff said in a low voice from her spot on the other side of Clint on the couch. Darcy widened her eyes in agreement and nodded.
"Next time," she whispered.
"Are you sticking around for a while this time?" Rogers asked Stark.
"Yep, I've got a… Thing to work on," Stark said, throwing a sidelong glance at Darcy.
"I might not have super special secret God-mode clearance, but I'm no tattletale," Darcy told him.
"That's not it, Physics Intern #3," Stark said, picking up a Hulk cookie and biting into it experimentally. "It's something personal. SHIELD doesn't tell me anything they don't want me to accidentally mention anyway, right, JARVIS?" he added loudly, lifting his chin and glancing at the light fixtures above him.
"That comment has been duly recorded for your records, Sir," the disembodied voice said from a hidden speaker in the ceiling.
"Not an intern," Darcy said. "Not a baker either, though I did make the cookies."
"They're good," Stark said, though he seemed distracted.
"What's got you so out of it?" Clint asked Stark. He got up and grabbed three cookies with a swift gesture that still somehow didn't manage to snag any of the Hulk ones. Darcy was impressed.
Stark licked a flake of icing off of his thumb absently. "Dad threw me a project a year before he died. I blew it off, of course," and here, Stark leaned over and threw his hands out in a clear gesture of sarcastic emphasis. "Now though?" He shook his head and snaked a hand back to snatch another cookie. "Might be worth a second look. Thanks for the snack!" Stark started for the wide doorway that led to the bank of elevators, and Darcy felt compelled to say something.
"Wait, do you… want to take some of these to Pepper? And oh my God, I just called her Pepper. In my defense, I might have gone and read everything about her that's legal and some things that probably weren't as soon as I learned I was going to live here? Which I shouldn't admit to. I get that, really, I do, but, it's Pepper Potts, and honestly-"
Darcy's words were cut off abruptly when a gentle hand cupped the back of her head. That action was immediately followed a split second later by a puff of air which was accompanied by a press of fabric against her face. She could breathe through it, but her jaw was completely locked in place by the cloth, which seemed like it was both soft and airy as well as set in unmovable concrete. It was pretty impressive tech, despite the situation.
"You were right, Nat. Instantaneous." Barton's voice beside her sounded pleased, but Darcy wasn't certain she was hearing properly, what with some sort of tactical gag covering her mouth and ears.
"Clint! She's a civilian!" Rogers shouted. One of Darcy's eyes wasn't completely obscured, and she was able to catch the twin looks of horror on both Iron Man and Captain America. They both walked over, but they weren't the first to reach her.
"Now you can make me cookies," Natasha (because this betrayal was enough to earn a first-name basis, if only in Darcy's head) whispered in her ear as she worked the gag free.
"Don't worry, apparently this was revenge for Sugar-Gate," Darcy said, rubbing at her jaw with her hand.
"We might be new here," Jane started saying, her head tilted back due to her lack of height. "But that doesn't mean you have a right to-"
"You're… okay, then?" Stark asked her, his words obscuring Jane, Rogers', and Banner's voices as they argued with Clint and Natasha.
"Yup, upgraded from science intern #3 to prime lab rat, looks like," she said. "And maybe Clint owed me one."
"It's Clint, then?" Stark said, looking a bit surprised. His eyebrows furrowed as he looked at her, leaning over to peer at her neck.
"It better be. If there's any more hazing I'm going to have to speak with HR."
"Speaking of which, yeah, I'll take some to Pepper, thank you." With that uncharacteristically low-key response, Stark turned away from her and walked over to the cookie racks, taking a handful and striding away, heedless of the mayhem that went on behind him. He almost looked like he was rushing to get away from it all.
For her part, Darcy felt almost grateful. Clearly Clint's revenge action had broken the ice for her, and the worst she had to suffer was the embarrassment of seeing both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers stare at her in horror.
Well, that and being gagged in the midst of a fangirl moment.
Still, the strangest thing for Darcy remained the oddly subdued way that outgoing playboy superhero Tony actual Stark had acted during the two times she'd gotten a chance to speak to him. Darcy would be lying if she told herself she wasn't disappointed that the notoriously flirty Stark hadn't even blinked at her chest, much less made some vague statement hitting on her. Pepper deserved his loyalty, after all, but Darcy read the gossip mags. Stark was a flirt.
It was hardly the strangest thing that had happened that week, though, and Darcy shook off her feelings of unease after she watched the man leave the room. She had an argument to diffuse.