Friday came with it's usual fanfare. It came at dawn singing, blaring mariachi music with the bass turned up, shaking the windows and sending the charging iphone racing across the nightstand.
All other days of the week, of course, suck.
They are long, stressful and drag around like cats on a scratch post. Friday has the same faults but as the favored Day, this fact is quickly glossed over with constant reminders that Friday can do no wrong.
Later, she will laugh with Friday as she drinks the other days under the bar and out of memory.
Today, on this most honored of Fridays, the coffee was cold and dark when she poured it in to her Styrofoam cup. The powdered cream floated to the top in a thick, clumpy white pond scum. She had a moment of temptation to drink around the layer of gross instead of taking on the task of brewing a new pot.
Only one person in the student lounge dared to brew coffee. It was a woman so old Darcy was pretty sure she came with the building, like the green fridge or the floral wallpaper in the ladies bathroom. It was the first thing she did upon entering the building and had been a part of her morning routine long before Darcy took an internship there and would be making it long after she had left. Well, maybe.
The years have not been kind to the brew master 2000. It predates the wheel – held together by habit, determination and the joy it gets from giving the office gastrointestinal issues.
Darcy know it's only holding out for the day it can take one of them with it in a glorious electronic blaze of faulty wires and smoking grinds.
Not her. Not today.
Instead, she heads down to student lobby, stopping in the 7-11 and to grab an iced coffee. Silently, she thanks whatever goodness in the world allowed a 7-11 to be built on campus. It's cold and sugar filled and leaves her feeling Zen-like.
She can solve world hunger now. Bring about the end of the liberal media. Stop the encroaching desertification of green lands.
From her seat in the computer commons, the white cubic top just high enough to block the view of the other students, she's sure she can change it all.
Coffee is a wonderful thing like that.
The chair next to her is drug out from under the desk, she catches black from the corner of her eye and smiles, her fingers never stopping their relentless dance over the keyboard.
"Come to check in?" She asks and glances over at him, looking over the black suit. "You'll notice today I'm wearing my red shirt."
"You wear a red shirt every Friday." He comments back taking a seat. Of course he notices the looks of the other students and her co-workers give him. There's very little he doesn't notice. He's quite good at understatement.
"I know." She says, still smiling. "I'm trying to say something deep and profound about my role in all this. I'm also considering starting up a support group for NPCs but it would clash with my me time."
"NPC?" He asks, thinking and then answers for her. "A WOW reference. Clever."
Darcy keeps typing, trying to lose herself in the program she's currently breathing life in to. There's the off chance he'll get bored and go away. It's happened in the past. She's not that important and if another, world threatening event rears it's head, Coulson leaves. But sometimes he stays.
The first few times he dropped in on her, she was irritated and angry. He started darkening her days shortly after she left the employment of one Jane Foster. Moved out of New Mexico to Denver and started taking computer programming courses.
It was probably the fact she had saturated her young brain with too many comic books but Darcy knew what tended to happen to the people that skirted the powerful. They were hostage fodder waiting to happen.
When Coulson first approached her, he was polite and honest and when Darcy accused him and SHEILD of pulling some government bullshit of following her around, bugging her house, tapping her wires, he was also straight forward.
"You aren't that important. I thought I'd drop in, make sure you were doing ok."
"You mean make sure some sicko wasn't going to use the fact that I interned with the great 'Jane Foster' for a few semesters as a national security threat."
"Something like that." He answered flatly with a smile.
There was a method to the drop ins. Always on a Friday. No matter if it was weeks or months after their last encounter, Coulson always showed up on a Friday. Darcy reasoned it was a his day off. Maybe Friday was traditionally a slow day for super villains.
It didn't matter what state she was in or where she hid herself away and after waking up to him cooking her breakfast over the campfire outside the tent she had set up in BFE, she gave up and went back to living life as normal as she could. Which was actually pretty normal.
Life moved on and with each passing day, the events of New Mexico grew distant. Every time a new super villain threated the world with domination, she watched it on the news like everyone else. There was that surreal moment where she'd catch Thor or another of the Avengers and think how much bigger they looked on TV, how unreal and untouchable. Once she even caught Jane on the evening news, arm in arm with a beaming Thor. She looked good and happy but there were stress lines were there hadn't been a year before.
Darcy figures the only reason Jane is still around is because she's a super genius and banging Thor. They never kill off the girlfriend. Girlfriend's less amazing, less attractive and pretty dang expendable sidekick, however...
"What are you working on?" Coulson asks, dragging her back to the present.
"Oh come on, you know already."
"You're right I do. But not because of any government conspiracy." He holds up his phone, which is open to her Twitter account, Crewman#6.
"You have got to friend me." She demands with a quick glance at his phone.
"I'll think about it." Coulson answers and tucks the phone away. He moves to leave and Darcy stops what she's doing to watch him go.
"You're wrong, you know." He offers, regarding her with that same passiveness he seems to approach everything with. Like he was commenting on the weather or making polite small talk. "You're worth something on your own. Not all great people have to, how did you put it..."
"Bang someone extraordinary to get taken off the 'dies for dramatic effect list'?"
"Yeah, something like that. Some of us do good in the shadows. Thrive in them. Seek them out. Sometimes, it's the people skirting the heroes that keep it all from going to shit."
Darcy laughs and it's real and that feels almost as good as the coffee. "That's the first time I've ever heard you curse."
"Is it? I apologize." He smiles but it's not all that apologetic. "Think on it though."
Darcy looks back at the screen before her, the lines of code broken down in to actions. She's rather proud of this last one. Very proud. It's not going to save the world. At the most it's going to streamline another, better program that could have the potential to save lives.
But the promise is there. And it's oh so good.
She's starting to feel like maybe, for the first time, she isn't three steps behind the group. Like maybe for the first time, she's skipping next to them. Like maybe, someday, she might be a breath in front of them.
"Hey Coulson," She calls as he makes his way towards the exit. Now everyone in the room is looking at her and him openly. Not that she minds. "Are you offering me a job I don't have to get on my back to apply for?"
"Believe me, no agent gets on their back as part of the hiring process." He seems to consider something and the smile turns in to mortification. "Did I ever mention Fury was the one that recruited me?" With a visible shudder, he pushes open the door that leads to the commons.
And holds it open.
"Ah screw it." Darcy says, grabbing her backpack from off her chair.
She doesn't quite run after him.
But she does feel like for the first time, she's catching up.
A/N – yeah, this is what happens when I read nothing but Loki and Darcy fics all week. Don't get me wrong, love the Darcy/Loki fics. But I started to notice a pretty common trend and was wondering, could Darcy stand alone as a character without having to be tied romantically to someone else? I think the answer is yes. A big huge HELL YES.
