Happy 17th December everyone. This one's a bit of a sadder story for today's advent fic, but it was tricky to find a decent song starting with Q. Anyway, I hope you like it, even though it deals with a tricky issue. As always, I own nothing to do with Marvel.
Q: Quiet Times - Dido
Quiet Times
Darcy breathed in deeply and then out again. In and out, in and out, in and out, before looking over at Ian and smiling. Her lips felt like they were stretched too widely across her face.
He smiled softly back at her and took her hand which was resting on the table, squeezing it gently. Her smile dropped; his fingers felt like manacles binding her to him. She needed to get away before she cried.
"I'm just going to the ladies' room," she leaned forward to tell him.
The effect was instantaneous: his smile turned into a frown, his fingers spasmed against hers and she could feel his eyes boring a hole into her head where she was half-turned towards him.
Pulling her hand back, she sent a weak smile around the table and then picked up her purse and wove through the tables surrounding them, offering greetings to those people she recognised and carefully evading the table near the dance floor where Steve and his trio of spies were sitting, flicking olives at each other. It would just be her luck for one of them to notice that something was wrong, and they were all like a dog with a bone once they noticed something going on.
Tony had just taken the stage – it was his benefit after all, Darcy was only there because Jane of all people had encouraged her to get out of the apartment for once – and all eyes were on him and Pepper as they greeted their guests and petitioned for donations. Darcy was able to slip out unseen.
She smiled at a couple of the guests as she pushed quietly into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall. Pushing the toilet lid down, she slumped down onto the seat and dropped her bag on the floor, her energy gone and her heart aching.
She wanted to get away from here – get away from Ian, just for a while. It wouldn't be fair though, not when what was happening to him wasn't his fault. If she were truly honest with herself, she would admit that she didn't just want to get away from him for a while, but permanently.
She couldn't think like that though. She couldn't be that person.
It had all started so promisingly as well.
Her relationship with Ian may have begun in the slightly awkward circumstances of an alien invasion in Greenwich, but they had quickly settled into semi-domestic bliss. They were a good together, working together to keep Jane and Erik semi-coherent (a task made much easier by Thor's presence back on Earth) and tracking anomalies in the night sky. Their relationship was never particularly heated, but it worked for them. They were friends and lovers and colleagues and they muddled along together quite affectionately.
Darcy fell into her role of science wrangler with gusto, keeping Jane, Erik and, on occasion, Thor on the right track as they worked to explain the Convergence and subsequent impact on physics in a way that was accessible to anyway who didn't have a Norse God either in their brain or in their bed. Ian, in turn, provided great support for Jane, particularly when it came to translating her notes into readable English or explaining what had happened in London in scientific terms using her pre-developed theories.
They were a team.
Until the moment where Ian's understanding of the work they were doing stopped and Jane and Erik's carried on.
Darcy had never worried about the intricacies of what Jane was doing. Most of the scientific terms went over her head and quite often Erik or Thor had to provide a simple translation of what Jane was going on about for her to follow. She knew what her role was in it all though – knew how important it was to her friend – and for her, that was all that mattered. She picked up most of it and could translate the majority of it in her brain after having worked with Jane for so long. She kept up in her own way.
Ian didn't.
His own research stalled, his funding was cut and any physics knowledge he possessed couldn't compete with Jane's genius, augmented by Thor's thousand-year-old understanding of the world, or Erik's quiet intelligence, twisted and warped into the crude understanding of everything in the world that the Tesseract had shown him while he was under Loki's control.
Ian fell behind and as he did it was as if a cloud came over his mind. He was moody and morose. He became uninterested in all the things they usually did together. He spent ages pouring over his own research, but then would destroy everything in a fit of rage if he couldn't make his theories work. He would yell at Darcy when she tried to help, or when she spoke to him, or when she suggested that they get out of the flat they shared with the others for once and do something together. But even the shouting didn't last.
And then gradually he became quiet. That was the worst part, Darcy always thought.
The quiet.
It was like he had become completely numb inside to the point where interacting with her became the biggest chore in the world.
She knew the name for it of course, had seen in her Auntie Lynn, but to see the damage Ian's depression wrought was just heartbreaking.
Heartbreaking and exhausting.
She wanted to run away. She couldn't run away. She wasn't that uncaring; she could never leave Ian, not when he needed support more than ever.
But a part of her whispered that his issues were dragging her down. She could already feel the tiredness creeping in at the thought of going home with him tonight, at listening to his list of everything that had gone wrong in his life (up to and including her), at the prospect of curling into bed with someone who didn't even want her anywhere near him half the time.
It wasn't the same as it was, but she couldn't be selfish, not now that he was depending on her. She couldn't walk away and it left her feeling so trapped.
She just wanted them to be happy again and for it not to be such a struggle.
"Darcy?" The knock came on the door of the stall. "Darcy, are you in there?" Jane asked.
Darcy swallowed heavily and got a tissue to wipe her face carefully of any signs of her weakness before standing up and flushing the toilet for good measure.
"There you are." Jane beamed at her as she emerged from the stall. "We were wondering where you were. Ian was getting worried."
Of course, he was.
"Sorry," she chirped, no sign of her distress in her voice. "I guess I just got caught up in my thoughts."
She smiled at Jane again before bracing herself to enter the ballroom and meet Ian's eyes once more.
She could put on a brave face. It was easy.
She did it every day after all.