"So, I have a question."

"If you're gonna ask me to stop mutilating all your computers, the answer is no."

He perched his butt on the desk, drumming his fingers against his arm. He'd been working for nearly thirteen straight hours in his workshop, trying to narrow his ever wondering mind to one train of thought, like mechanical engineering often did for him. Darcy had stumbled in nat four in the morning, yawned, asked if he needed the dusty desktop unused in a corner, and went about dismantling it.

His mind had kicked into gear, then, running on three or four levels of things. Pepper was always on one level, the avenging stuff was another. Developing new ideas and theories was another constant stream, but the newest addition to his onion-esque thought process was Darcy.

He had never been a subtle creature, and he had no intentions of starting any time soon.

"Did you have a good life, when I wasn't in it?"

"You were always in my life." she answered without looking up from the disassembled computer on her lap. She twirled a screwdriver with an artist's precision, brow drawn in thought. "I've been pulling apart your tech like this since I could walk."

"I meant, when I wasn't in it. As in, me."

"You've always been in my life too. You're pretty famous, in case you weren't aware."

"I meant like... As your dad."

"Yeah. You were still there."

He couldn't tell if she was being a smart ass or not. She was far too calm, as she pulled the motherboard from the circuits and placed it to her right. Her glasses were perched on the end of her nose, and briefly, he played with the idea of developing an eye-operated lenses that could stay on retina without potentially damaging it, like contacts.

"I mean, I always knew you were alive." she continued, prodding the remaining structure with her screw driver. "That was pretty much all I knew, though."

"You didn't... Miss out, on any dad stuff?"

She looked up, thoughtfully eyeing the roof with a small hum.

"Well, I got pretty handy with a wrench because you probably know Kate is useless with anything that might break a nail. And you should have seen us try and kill spiders or get rid of mice, like, that was a drama that could've been avoided. But 'dad stuff'...?"

She flicked her eyes back to him, a nervous ball of energy, trying to be still. He shifted his weight, tapped his fingers, wrinkled his nose.

"Do you want honesty, or like, real honesty?" she quirked a brow.

"Give it to me straight, kiddo." he opened his arms like he was issuing a challenge. Probably not the best thing to do, considering her heritage.

There were certain points in her life when not having a father had been paramount to her misery. Later on, more so than in her childhood - the hollow the lack of parent left in her chest had been tiny at first, then festered and infected the more she picked at it, thought about it, grew up wanting to know.

Darcy was seven years old when she noticed she was absent a parent. She was in her Spanish class, giggling behind her hand with her best friend Allan, when the teacher gave them the assignment to write their family tree back to their grandparents in the foreign language. Until then, Darcy had been excelling in the area - she had always had an excellent handle on words, be it in her language or not.

She could hold half a conversation with the teacher, and swore in it fluently, creatively, and frequently.

She did her mother's half of the family tree, adding little notes beside the names; granny made the best apple pie in the world and smelled like sweets and wore only pale colors like lavender and baby pink and mint green.

Grandpa smoked a pipe and had a ring of white wiry hair around his head like a broken halo, and took his false teeth out when no one else looked to pull faces at Darcy that had her screaming with laughter.

She noted that her mother was beautiful, angel like. Blonde hair that went all the way to her waist, clear skin, big blue eyes. She wore power suits to the super market but on weekends Darcy made her cardboard armour that she made look regal over pancakes and orange juice.

But her father's side was devastatingly empty. That was the first thing she realized, but she didn't know why that was wrong - it was just her world as she knew it. At seven years old, she had never known a family with a father in it. That was just the way it worked.

She raised her hand, waved it, got distracted by Allan jabbing her ribcage with a pencil and retaliated with a spit ball war.

The teacher - Ms McGuffin? McKenna? Ms Mack - was rather adept at stopping these, so she put her clip board in between the small war zone and moved Darcy to the other side of the room.

"Are you having trouble with it, Darcy?" she seemed a little confused, seeing as the child was often finished before she could ask more questions. "Do you need help?"

"No, I'm done!" she tried to hand the teacher her family tree.

"What about your dad, hmm?"

"I dunno." she shrugged shoulders.

"Well, are your parents divorced?"

"I dunno." she tried again, to hand the teacher the paper.

"Come on, Darcy, don't be lazy. I know you're better than this." she nodded to the sheet. "Finish that in the next five minutes, okay? I'm coming back to check."

And she went to go help one of the less proficient students in the class with the word for 'mother'.

Allan had snuck up beside her on hands and knees, and popped up to put his chin on the table.

"Is your dad dead?"

"Don't think so..." she couldn't figure out why she felt so small; why those questions rang in her head. There were not many things Darcy Lewis couldn't answer, in her world. The sky was blue because space was black and black and blue went together. It rained because angels were crying. She didn't have a father because...

"Why don't you know him?" the boy was incredulous. "He might be dead."

"I don't know." she mumbled, and scowled at the page.

Darcy left school not long after, feeling sick in the tummy.

Her mother came in a navy suit with cream pumps with a little gold trin around the heel; her shirt was a peachy colour, and it made her skin seem to glow. Darcy forgot that sick girls don't run and barreled into her mother, squashing her face against the soft material of her shirt, clinging to her with two tight, tiny fists.

When they got to the car, Darcy curled into a ball on the front seat, head pressed against what she could reach of the window. Her mother was very calm, driving them home, even if she had to leave work early and she hated that almost as much as being late to places.

Darcy still felt sick.

"Mama?"

"Hm?"

"Is my dad dead?"

Her well shaped brows shot up, and she glanced at the girl for a long moment, before turning her eyes back to the road.

"Not that I've heard, though knowing your father, it's probably imminent."

"What's imminent?"

"Just about to happen."

"Oh."

She waited a beat, put her hand to her belly and held onto it. Some of the sick feeling had gone away, but now it was a pulse, uncomfortable and just shy of painful.

"Did you guys divorce?"

"We were never married."

"Is he fighting in a war or something?"

"Technically... No."

"How come he doesn't live with us then?"

"Oh, I'd think he would hate living with us. We're too 'domestic'... Your father wouldn't cope. He barely copes in his own life as it is."

Darcy felt that oozy, queasy feeling in her belly again.

"Did he leave because of me?"

"No, he left because of him. It wasn't me, it wasn't you. Just him. He left before you were born... Well, I left. I was living with him."

"Well, why'd you leave?"

"Because he didn't want me any more. Your father... Has a complex."

And Darcy knew what that was - or the general idea of what that was - because her mother was a brain doctor. She made sad people feel better just by talking. Sometimes they had complexes, sometimes they had bad memories, sometimes they didn't know what was wrong, but that's what her ma was for.

"What kinda complex?"

"What we call a superiority complex... Which is my way of saying he thinks he's better than everyone. I also think he has problems with his father, but that could just be him not co-operating. I'd call him socially retarded, but he's very charming when he wants to be." she sighed, rubbed her temple with one hand.

"Your father is... Brilliant, but selfish and mean. He cuts off from the world, has an alcohol problem... He's a little bit broken."

Darcy thought about that for a little while.

"Did you fix him?"

"I don't think any one can fix him unless he wants to be fixed, sweetheart."

"Then why did he go to you to get fixed?"

"He didn't. I was to monitor his sobriety; I was hired by the court to stay with him for three months. I lasted two weeks." she put her hand back on the wheel. "He wouldn't even remember me."

"So.. Am I ever gonna meet him?"

"Not if I can help it."

"Why not?"

"Because, he's not a good person. He can't care for himself, let alone you." Darcy physically recoiled from that,eyes going wide. "I'm sorry, Darcy, I know it sounds mean, but it's true. You're my baby and I have to look after you first."

She reached over and put her hand to her head, testing her temperature.

"Is this what made you feel sick?"

"Yeah."

"Feel better now?"

"Not really."

"You want some ice cream?"

Darcy tried not to play up her illness for sympathy, but it just didn't work.

She had never been a subtle creature, and she had no intentions of starting any time soon.

So Darcy had believed that she was fine without having a father, until she was thirteen years old and realized that traditional weddings involved the father "giving away" the daughter.

She had been at a cousin's wedding rehearsal, in the bridal party. She wore combat boots under a hideous orange dress, praying to a god she didn't believe in to kill her while she was in the height of her suffering.

Then the father-daughter dance... she tossed her bouquet, picked up the skirt, and stormed away to outside. She had full intentions of walking to the movies and sneaking in to watch something good but her mother caught her, and made the mistake of asking what was wrong.

"It's so stupid! I don't want a wedding!"

"You're not getting married," came the soothing voice of a psychiatrist. "You don't have to have one."

"It's not like you can give a person away! I'm a person, not a thing!"

"He can't give you away, Darcy." her mother peered over her glasses at her. "You can't give away something that isn't yours."

And that brought her whole world down around her. She crashed into her mother and held on, breathing in her perfume, the subtle,sweet notes that felt like home.

"I have no one to dance with." she muttered. "That's the ways weddings go, right? No one wants me, no one to dance with, and every one will know-"

"Stop talking yourself into it." her mother soothed, rubbing her back. "I'll give you away, Darcy. You're my daughter before you're his."

And it had been in that moment that Darcy Lewis swore that she would never want a father again.

-098765456789098765

It was an after party, and what parts she could remember of it were awesome. It was one of those parties you tell to your friends, those parties strangers remember you for.

She was with the love of her life, Johnny, who was a delicious bad boy drop out who did art and smoked pot in his spare time. He'd never been with anyone as long as he had been with Darcy - he'd told her he loved her before she told him.

He got her this bootlegged booze and two cups later she was totally out of her mind. The room wasn't straight and the lines in the pavement were wiggling and she was so hell bent on having sex in the half full pool, but Johnny wasn't that bad and pulled her out of the water before she could remove any more clothes.

"C'mon, babe." he said, slinging an arm around her. "We've got a way to walk."

The lack of clothing, the damp chlorine in her skin - Darcy was freezing cold, and not even Johnny's heavy leather jacket helped take the edge off the bite in the wind. She was drunk and numb but she could still feel the cold; her fingers wouldn't curl into fists, frozen in a half clawed shape.

Then they strolled past the fateful black vehicle.

"Heeeey. Maserati! C'mon, baby, let's go home in style." she leaned over the hood, gave him sexy eyes, crossing her legs so the skirt rode up an indecent inch.

"Darce, I can't handle the system on that thing." he reminded her, palm ghosting over the handle.

"You bought something to unlock it?"

"Like I didn't. But I can't jimmy the lock, babe. I can't jimmy anything older than the eighties."

"Psh. That's what you have me for." she pushed off the hood, ran her hands over his shoulders. "Maserrrratiiii..."

"And you think you can hot wire it?" both brows cocked.

"Know I can." she pouted. "Trust me, it's kind of my thing."

"There's a reason I love you." he pressed a short kiss to her mouth. "You can't drive, though. You will kill us both."

"Mmhm. All I hear is 'yes, I will do what you want'. Amiright?"

He checked over his shoulder.

"Go on, then." he slid the length of metal into the crevice between window and door. Darcy made a noise like moaning.

"Oh baby, be gentle."

"No time for gentle. This one's a screamer." he muttered, and pulled up, unhooking the lock. The car did in fact, scream, but Darcy dove into the seat and within two short seconds, yanked out the wires that made it so noisy.

"See?"

"I see." he was looking at her butt. "Come on, get her to purr."

"Gotta-... Touch her the right way." she told the car floor. Drunk eyes could barely distinguish colours in the darkness, but she found what looked to be the right wires and tapped them together. The engine roared. She wiggled her butt as a victory dance.

"Move over." he pulled her up by the hips, dumping her in the back seat. She passed out before they made the first turn.

The return home ... Could've gone better.

It was blurry to her, but she remembered a light clicking on, knowing Johnny was in his own bed, the Maserati still purring behind her. Her mother was in her dressing gown, frowning already, but when she saw the car, a look of total panic washed over the concern.

"Darcy, who's car is that?"

"Uhm... His name is... Colonel Mustard, he lives in the dining room with a candlestick?"

And Darcy and thought it was funny.

But then the screaming happened.

"You stole a car!"

"Calm down, ma, it's fine! I didn't damage the dash. If we change the plates we can sell it and you can go back to school and get a license to sell medicine and make the moneys -"

"Do not make this a good thing! This is not a good thing!"

"Well, like, originally I just wanted to get home, but like, now you can sell it, see? Goes both ways, yanno?"

Darcy was fairly certain she was going to get a smack in the face.

"How could you do this?!"

"Uh, well, it was kinda easy. I just stuck the right wires together, and BAM, DRIVING - !"

"NO!" her mother put both hands over her mouth, as if to contain the scream that had already left. She stormed to the car, realized that she had no idea how to turn it off, then spun on Darcy, stabbing her finger at her like she had a sword. "You are so much like him!"

"Who?"

"YOUR FATHER! There was a reason I didn't want you near him - he was just - RECKLESS - like this! I can't believe the pull for deviancy is so strong in his DNA! I have never been so disappointed in my life, Darcy, do you hear me?" she stomped her foot. "You get in that car and you tell me where you got it from."

"I don't know where I-"

"YOU WILL GIVE IT BACK!"

"But I don't remember-!"

"WELL START TRYING." she jabbed her stabby finger at the vehicle. "GO TURN IT OFF!"

And Darcy remembered wanting to start driving away in it, but her mother stood in the open door with a hand on the strap of Darcy's dress to prevent exactly that.

Half a year after she took the car back - and got away with every thing - she had plans to go and celebrate one of Johnny's friends turning twenty one. She had told her mother a month in advance, and took the resulting silence as a grudging acceptance.

She was wrong.

"Where do you think you're going?" her mother didn't so much as look away from the book propped on her lap.

"I'm going."

The bitterness had never left her mother's system, churning in her stomach and boiling her blood since the incident.

"Where?"

"Out."

"With who?"

"Whoever I feel like."

"Take off those shoes." came the quiet demand. She casually turned a page. "Take off that dress. You aren't going anywhere."

"You can't keep me forever! I made one mistake -"

"You broke the law!"

"I wasn't caught-"

"THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT OKAY TO STEAL A CAR!"

Darcy stormed to the door, a feat in shoes with heels that made her six feet tall.

"I'm not your prisoner! I'm going whether you like it or not!"

"You will stay in this house, or you wont have a home to come back to."

"You're not going to kick me out!" Darcy scoffed, and flipped tediously straightened hair over her shoulder to confirm with her eyes what her ears had heard. Her mother was glowering at her now, her jaw set. The book on her lap was being held tightly in both hands.

"I'm not kicking you out. You're going to leave. If you walk out now, don't expect to walk back in."

The fight that came of that wasn't pretty. She insulted everything from Darcy's intelligence to Darcy's desperation to make Johnny happy, and Darcy heard echoes of the truth in the vicious barbs that she didn't want to hear. So she did the normal thing, and tore both shoes off her feet, attempting to end the argument with a hearty:

"I HATE YOU!"

"I hate this behavior. You're not a child, don't start emulating one."

"Why don't you just get my dad to handle it? Better yet, just tell me who he is already!"

"You don't need to know."

"Yes! Yes, I do! As if you didn't know all my life I've wondered who he is - you know who he is, right?"

"Well, I haven't been comparing your attention seeking to a ghost, have I?"

"HOW EXACTLY AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW?!"

"You don't get to know."

"Why?!"

"Because I am your mother, and I know what's best for you! Introducing you to that - egomaniac - will ruin you! He will bring out everything bad in you! I have worked so hard to bring you up by myself, Darcy! I love you! I'm trying to keep you from ending up like him!"

"Like what!?"

"Bitter and alone!"

"No, that's keeping me from ending up like YOU!"

Her mother had gone pale as a sheet. Darcy couldn't handle the tension. She called Johnny in hysterics, but all he could understand was she wasn't coming and she was really upset. He was already at the party; her fighting with her mother had gone on almost an hour and a half. When she hadn't showed, he had left without her.

Which made her feel like someone had smashed a shovel over her head.

The week before the prom, Darcy went shopping for her gown alone. No friends in the event that they saw how cheaply she paid for her dress, and no mother because she did not approve of the prom and made it painfully clear.

She had to buy a dress that effortlessly fit her, one that didn't touch the floor but could cover her shoes, because between paying to get her hair done and the jewelry she had to buy, she had run herself broke.

Johnny knew the drill. Darcy had organized a taxi to take her to the shopping complex, where He'd show up in his rumbly mustang and drive her to the prom. He had a flask of something strong for the two of them, and a previously packed bag of Darcy's clothes for a secret weekend away. She couldn't contribute monetary funds to the lodge he'd booked but she needn't have bothered - he hadn't paid for it, just planned to break into it.

She never made it to prom to find that out, anyway. Her mother, suspicious of her daughter having to catch a taxi to her friend's place, followed in her own car. She allowed Darcy to have exactly five seconds of feeling glamorous and wonderful as Johnny's mouth opened when he saw her.

Then she got out of the car, and dragged Darcy in behind her.

"Now, you have two choices. I can take you to prom or I can take you home."

"Take me home, but take a left and go to hell!"

"There's really no need for that."

"THERE IS NO NEED TO GOVERN MY LIFE LIKE THIS!"

"If you knew what I knew, you'd know different."

"THEN TELL ME! KATE, TELL ME!"

She wouldn't.

Naturally, Darcy took a vow of silence in a show of true teenage rebellion.

Two weeks later, she snuck out to go to a party with Johnny, who got high as a kite and told her being in a relationship with her was great, because it was like being in a relationship with an occasionally solid ghost.

They broke up - well, he broke up with her when the notion of her being 'occasionally solid' offended her - and she refused to believe in love for anything other than Pop Tarts, her taser and herself.

College was the best part of Darcy's life because she flew the nest. She didn't just fly the nest, she took a running start and leapt out of it to soar away in a fit of fantastic feathers. She left everything of hers behind aside from her iPod, her taser, and a few pairs of jeans.

Everything else, she thrifted. She never asked her mother for a single cent, never asked to send through an item of clothing or kitchen ware, nothing. The wounds of having one parent tore open longer strips in her heart, because now she had none.

To keep herself in school - away from 'home' - she had to get a job. She missed a lot of classes hunting for one or alternatively working, and even if what she handed in was well written and highly graded, she only ever handed in half the required work amount.

Which is why she needed extra credit wherever would take her in. The further away from 'home', the better. So New Mexico sounded more like heaven than trouble.

She got to work on the machines, occasionally connecting the dots and altering them to better suit her boss, who was the most intense person she had ever met.

Then Thor happened.

She got shifted around.

Got her iPod back.

And moved into Stark tower, because Jane absolutely wouldn't let her go, and SHIELD needed her somewhere they could keep an eye on her, so it was win/ win for them. Besides, New York was the last place her mother would go, living in dainty suburbia all Darcy's life.

Meeting Tony for the first time was like witnessing a solar flare through a super telescopic lens. She was left star struck and over whelmed with a black smudge on her iris like an imprint of the sun. He'd made a sassy comment, did some things, complimented her handiwork with the machines, offered her a job and walked out again.

Having sworn to speak to Kate as little as possible seemed dramatic on reflection - she felt grown up, ready to forgive and forget. Her brain had been nagging to build the bridge for a while; and now she was 'stable' and had 'good' friends, she thought her mother might finally be proud of her.

She was very wrong.

"You being this quiet is never good."

"I am... Thinking. You wanted honesty." she winced as she looked up at him, a crease in between her brow. "I never missed you. You can't miss something you never had... But now-?" she swallowed, hands clutching the screwdriver tightly.

"Can you give me away at my wedding?"

He baulked.

"What wedding?"

"Just- if I get married. It's tradition. That's the only thing that ever got to me. To get given away at my wedding. The father daughter dance after. I just... I never wanted a dad, and then..."

He looked at his shoes.

"It's important to you?"

"Yeah. Kinda is."

He glanced at her.

"If you pick the right guy."

"I don't think falling in love is about picking any one, dad."

Somehow, the casual name drop made the seriousness of her conversation warmer. He shifted, popped up from the desk.

"Hey, wait." she put her screwdriver down. "We're in a head space. We're in it together."

"Yeah, not really keen on staying here." he sighed upon witnessing the fall of her hopeful expression. "Oh, come on, with the Disney Princess eyes. What? What's wrong?"

"I wanted to ask you something." she propped her head on her fist, looking like she was up to something.

"I'm not going to like the subject matter, am I?"

"Probably not. I don't care. How much do you know about your parents?"

"Huh." He wiped grimy palms on the fronts of his jeans. "Never really thought about the quantity of things I knew. I guess... I know my mother was a brunette. Thin, warm, Italian. I know she was quiet, but sometimes she would come out with these zingers that'd knock my dad over."

"And your dad?"

"I didn't know my dad. Not until he was dead. Then he was still kicking my ass." He cocked a brow. "Why do you ask?"

"Just-... I probably get it from Kate. I hate not finishing things." she stood, adjusting her Oscar the Grouch pajamas (of which she had been in all day, and had a smudge of grease up the side of her left calf) before opening a holographic spread sheet. "I mean, it's a problem. She'd probably diagnose me with something if she knew."

She drew the trunk, the branches. She wrote "Papá" and "Mamá" and then drew the branches shooting up. She wrote the two above his as "Sassy Grandma Stark" and "Ass Kicking Grandpa Stark".

"That's been on me since I was seven years old." she told him warmly, writing his name above "Papá".

"Satisfied?" he strolled up to it, tipping his head at the joining lines.

"Ugh, you've got no idea." she stepped back, beaming at it.

But she'd forgotten something - he stretched out a finger and joined his and Kate Lewis' name together, dragging the line down to a new connection. "Darcy Stark" made his heart expand several times in his chest, and he took a step back to admire it as she did.

"That's better." he said, considering it.

"Yeah." she was looking straight through it at him. "I'd say so, papi."