Erik and Darcy sat down in the sand before the ten minute mark, but Jane kept standing, pacing in the sand, head tilted up to the sky as she waited for her buff boyfriend to come swooping down.
They waited for an hour more. Erik kept his doubts to himself, and Darcy played Angry Birds on her phone, keeping her head down so she didn't have to watch Jane wring her hands anxiously, to wait and hope so fearfully. Sirens screamed in the distance. SHIELD came, SHIELD went.
In the end, Darcy led Jane away by the hand.
In their empty lab', Darcy sat at the table with her laptop screen open. Google search was open, but her fingers were paused over the keyboard, hesitating. She felt majorly weird which was pretty understandable. It had already been one hell of a day.
What with half of New Mexico being blown to shit, Jane's honey turning out to be an honest to fricking Tumblr norse god, and then that weird bearded guy smoozing all over her hand like a horny frat boy. Not to mention being invaded by a whole super secret organization with designs on her I-Pod. And a load of Jane's duct tape - sorry, sorry, equipment.
Darcy was totally going to roast somebody alive until her shit was returned - it would take days to upload all of those songs again, and she was weeks away from graduating, so hell to the no did she have that much time. Not to mention the money to buy a new one.
Which was a damn shame cause she could really use some tunes right now.
Because Jane was on the roof, after Darcy had squished out a dozen or so outraged promises regarding the dumbassery of suicide, and Erik had disappeared after muttering creepily to himself not long ago. Clearly, the whole god thing had cracked his sciencey brain right down the middle and turned him into a Lord Of The Rings audition. Which she just knew she was gonna have to deal with.
But that was later, some time after calling up her mom from Philly (only her mom because her dad had bailed when she was thirteen, when they still lived in Kentucky and went by his name) and convincing her that no, she had been interning in a different part of New Mexico just to avoid that freak out.
Agent I-Pod Thief had promised to return the majority of their stuff in the morning, because apparently even jack-boothed thugs needed to rest their brains over the whole god thing, so there was nothing for her to do in the pretense of being too busy to notice Jane's thundering cloud of misery from upstairs.
Pop's family always had a knack for being cold-blooded, and before her mom had convinced her that dulling down her accent was smart rather than a betrayal, she'd mastered a damn good impression of mean without crossing over into cruel. Either way, Darcy sucked at comforting people. She was more of a Yeah, So That Happened, Whatever kind of girl. Unromantic, her ex-boyfriends have said, and yeesh, wasn't that like a college boy's wet dream or something?
But for all that Jane was a BAMF scientist, the woman forgot to feed herself and had the unfortunate habit of overlooking a hair-brush most days. She'd dated that jerk Donald Blake for like three years because she was a hopeless romantic who wanted Prince Charming so bad that she overlooked how much of a Romantic False Lead the guy was - until Darcy had come along with her double DD chest then tasered the guy into Droolsvile for getting handsy, and Jane was too good of a boss to forgive that.
Darcy looked around the barren room and groaned in annoyance. Damned conscience. Getting up from her chair, she closed her laptop, hoisted it up to her generous hip, and went for the fridge. In the ice box, there was a tub of old chunky monkey which would just have to do, even though Jane was one of those freaks who liked nuts in ice cream, and below that, there was a bottle of Erik's white wine that he deserved to lose because of his little vanishing act.
Seriously, who would leave an emotionally injured person with her?
After shoving two spoons into her pocket, clutching the wine in one arm, balancing her laptop over the other while holding the ice cream in the other hand, Darcy made it to the roof on what was mainly Lewis grit and maybe some latent ninja skills. As expected, Jane was standing beside the roof edge, staring up at the stars with a green blanket wrapped around her shoulders. And paying Darcy's struggle zero attention.
"Little help here!" she yelped.
Jane startled out of her thoughts, which was a serious miracle, and whirled around, eyes wide. "Darcy? What - " The younger woman's glare made her drop the question pretty quick and dart forward to take the laptop out of her arms. "What is all of this?"
"Standard Lewis care package," Darcy replied, far more cheerful now her laptop wasn't in danger of death via stairs. "A remedy for all that ails you."
Jane blinked. "Darcy, that's sweet of you, but I - I just want to be alone right now."
"No, you don't," Darcy assured her. "You want ice cream and wine and an internet full of lolcats - all of which I can provide." She flashed a convincing grin at her friend, swirling the wrist holding Erik's wine temptingly.
But still, Jane hesitated for a moment longer, before she sighed softly. "You don't have any glasses."
"Janey," Darcy said, "Sometimes I swear you've never been to college before. We chug this straight from the bottle."
There was no way in hell a bottle of wine was going to get Darcy, who had actual college experiences unlike her genius boss, drunk. But Jane was a little smaller than her, mass wise rather than height, and not exactly a big drinker, so Darcy had some hope for that. By the time half the bottle was gone, Jane had started a small bonfire with the empty ice cream carton, a rock, and wine. ("To Science!" Darcy had cheered, toasting the air and ignoring Jane's slurring corrections.)
The two of them were settled on the sunbathing chairs, the laptop settled between Darcy's knees, her legs spread on either side of the chair. The sky was dark and filled with bright white stars, and the taste of smoke was thick in the air. Beside her, Jane shifted and sighed before taking a swig of the bottle.
"Thor and I talked about Science."
"Thor knows Science?" Darcy said, lifting her head in surprise, 'cause sure Thor was her buddy, but really? There goes the anti-Jane's-Science kinship she'd been feeling toward him.
"Well, magic," Jane corrected.
"Magic is Science?"
"Not really," her friend murmured, closing her eyes.
"That totally makes sense." Darcy snagged back the bottle and drank deeply, letting the wine flow down her throat.
"He told me about his world," Jane continued quietly. Her voice quivered, and Darcy lifted her head, eyes cracking open in concern. She saw that her boss' eyes were closed, face shifting like she was trying to force back tears, to keep her face smooth and even and rational like a beautiful female scientist had to be. "He told me I was right."
And Jesus, that made Darcy's chest tighten painfully. It really sucked that Jane found a guy who admired her beautiful brain and her face only to lose him like five seconds later, to watch him die then disappear into the sky like a hot blonde Jesus.
"Jane, you're like a super-genius; you're right pretty much always," Darcy said, going for flippant, even as she reached across to grasp Jane's hand. Just like leading Jane, silent and dark-eyed, away from the Frost opening.
Or something like that.
There weren't a whole lot of things capable of bringing Darcy down but this was one of them. Too many memories of her mom, maybe, as she waited by the door for her husband to walk back into the house, to bring his stuff back and settle down properly. Yeah, like that ever worked.
Jane shook her head slightly, looking down at Darcy's pale hand. Her eyes were like brown glass in the firelight, and her mouth moved silently, forehead creased with pain. "I'm too old to . . . to feel like this about someone I've only just met." Her head shook with more force, a bitter gasping sound leaving her mouth. "It isn't logical."
"Neither was Thor's chest," Darcy pointed out. "I mean, he had like an eight pack or something. It was almost creepily hot."
A staggering tearful laugh slipped from Jane's mouth, and her fingers squeezed tight around Darcy's hand. "I hit him with my car."
"Twice," she confirmed. She tossed back more of the wine, the sparkling sweetness exploding around her mouth, and Darcy swallowed it slowly, using the taste for courage. "You love him."
Because Darcy Lewis knew the signs of a love-zombie, had cut off a relationship fast at the first sign before her style could be cramped, and Jane was sporting all of them from the squee to despair. How the hell someone could fall in love within two fricking days was beyond Darcy, but so was astrophysics, another thing that was totally up Jane's alley.
Her friend sniffled, face still crinkling in despair. "He's gone, Darcy."
"You can get him back," Darcy said with certainly, remembering months of watching Jane's eyes flare with brilliance and years of watching her mother stride through life with a southern brand of stubbornness. She had never fought for a guy before, out of indifference rather than shyness, but she knew when it was time to fight for something.
"I don't know how," Jane said, her eyes going wide and horrified at the truth - at, for what had to be the first time, her lack of knowledge. "I don't have the data, I don't have - "
"SHIELD clearly thinks you can do it," Darcy interjected because politics was another thing she knew, and there was a buttload more psychology in that than most people thought. She sat up to properly drive her point home. "They're kissing your ass by returning our stuff because they need your big beautiful brain to power this thing. I mean, Thor told you about his world's Science, right?" she shrugged.
Slowly, Jane nodded, the haze of depression clearing out from behind her eyes.
"You just gotta figure out how to use that, and I'm pretty sure pieces of that Death Robot are being molested by SHIELD's peons, so that might help you figure out what the hell is going on up there." Sensing her friend's lingering uncertainty, Darcy added, "If anybody outside of Tony Stark can do it, it's gonna be you, Jane. Besides you're less of a hilarious dick which, while kinda boring, does free your time up for Sciencey purposes."
The only way, Darcy decided as she settled back down, that could have been more inspiring would have been to a backdrop of 'Don't Stop Believing'. Jane shifted suddenly on the deck chair beside her, and her eyes were going wide, clusters of thought bursting into being behind her eyes.
"I need my notebook," Jane said abruptly, jumping to her feet and darting forward.
"Hey!" Darcy yelped when the scientist smashed into her legs, and then scrambled over her body to reach the roof door. Without another word, Jane disappeared down the stairs, tawny brown hair swinging fiercely behind her. "What?" she said to an empty roof. "It couldn't wait until morning?"
She swiped the wine bottle and took a deep swig. Of course, it couldn't. This was Jane Foster, after all. Whatever.
Darcy Lewis laid back down on the chair, letting the bottle rest against her thigh as she tilted her head back up to the bright pinpoints of stars in the sky. The night air was cool in her lungs, so unlike the thick heat in Kentucky. She hadn't been back there since before New Mexico, and that visit had been short, just popping in on her cousins on the cross country drive back from a trip in Ohio to Culver in Virginia.
Maybe it was time for another visit before the SHIELD suits decided which way to screw up her future. If she could scrap Jane out of the lab for a week, maybe she could drag her along.
Downstairs, Darcy heard a shout of irritation as Jane realised her equitment was still MIA, and she rolled her eyes, grinning to herself. In a moment, she would have to soothe her boss - yet again - but for now, there was a bottle to finish off.