"Yo."
Jane and Erik looked up from their desks and saw a young bespectacled woman standing in the doorway to their shared office at Culver.
The mystery woman blew a bubble-gum bubble and popped it loudly.
"Hey. Are you Darcy?"
Jane expected a man – and then felt bad because she was already so aware of the lack of diversity within STEM workplaces. She hated that she had inadvertently played into the idea that the intern – the only intern – interested in coming with them to New Mexico in three days was male.
"Yeah," Darcy said. "And you're Doctor Foster."
Darcy indicated Erik. "And you're Doctor Selvig."
Darcy was the one who got them the van they needed once they arrived in Puente Antiguo. Jane didn't dare ask where she got it, or whose van it was previously.
It smelt like Culver dorm rooms Jane used to occupy during her undergrad years.
One night Jane caught Darcy smoking a joint outside under the stars, and promptly took it from her, putting it out under her boot and handing it back to her.
"We're not doing that here."
"Why?" Darcy asked. "I'm not being paid to do this. I took a break. I did the data entry you wanted me to do –"
"It's not that," Jane said, trying her hardest to stay gentle. Darcy had the ability to make her bicker with her like she was her long lost baby sister with thumbs for fingers.
She sighed. "Erik doesn't need to get any ideas."
Darcy's eyes widened. "What?"
"He indulges too much if he gets any ideas," Jane added in a hush tone, looking around to see if Erik was anywhere within earshot. "And he has mental health issues."
Darcy snorted. "Who doesn't?"
"Darcy," Jane chided, though she felt her own lips quirk for a second. "I mean it. You can smoke it but you'd have to be in town or somewhere really private. Not here."
"Okay, deal," Darcy said, with a nod. "Except you have to smoke at least once with me."
"That doesn't sound like any kind of deal – "
"Why are you so judgemental of recreational drug use? You're an astrophysicist. I know you space nerds get into all kinds of shit. I heard about Bruce Banner."
Jane thought of one of Erik's protégés who'd gone missing years ago after a freak accident in his lab. He was into gamma radiation though, as well as the space nerd stuff, as Darcy would put it.
"Bruce Banner is not the poster boy for drug use in college."
"You have Xanax in your bathroom cabinet."
Jane glared at her intern. "Why were you snooping in my room?"
"You said you had Tylenol. My endometriosis was really bad last month!"
Darcy looked hurt, which worked on Jane too well.
She sighed, shaking her head.
"Okay. Sometimes I need it to calm down."
Roughly a week later, they shared that godforsaken blunt, and then Darcy showed Jane her taser in her backpack.
Jane reeled back, horrified, before she began to giggle.
"What? Since when?"
"The fuck do I look like, running around in the middle of the desert without proper protection?"
"How would you even get that?" Jane asked, fascinated by the little device.
She turned it over in her palm, seeing that Darcy decorated it with Hello Kitty stickers.
"I have my ways," Darcy whispered, winking in the moonlight.