Jane was the first to notice the similarities between Tony and Darcy. As soon as the genius/playboy/billionaire/philanthropist stepped into her New Mexico lab for the first time there was an undeniable echo of her favorite intern present. He had a relaxed stance, leaning almost a far back standing up as her assistant was in the chair she sat in. Said assistant's first reaction to spotting the infamous Iron Man was an eloquent "Shit!" and the fumbling and subsequent dropping of her lunch, a salad consisting of mostly bacon toppings in a grocery store to-go container. Tony, nonplussed, just tossed her the snack sized bag of blueberries that he pulled out of nowhere, to which Darcy piped up, "Cool! Free food."
He pointed at her dramatically. "Free equals cheap. Those blueberries cost more than some people's entire livelihood. I'd hardly consider them 'free'."
She lifted the bag in a mock toast. "Even better. Free rich people food."
Jane was a mess, frantically tidying up her hopelessly messy desk while the man was distracted with her intern's antics. "Mr. Stark, what can we help you with?"
Darcy, as blunt as ever followed up the question with her own interpretation. "I think that words the big boss lady is looking for are: what the actual fuck possessed you to take a trip to Nowhere New Mexico to visit a loony scientist and her oh-so charming assistant?"
"Darcy!" Jane admonished. It was their first time meeting the famous inventor and she worried that Darcy might offend him with her tendency to speak first and think later.
"Charming indeed," Tony agreed instead with a grin, but then he was all - albeit a bit sarcastically - business when he turned his attention back to Jane. "A little birdy told me Shield stole all of your toys, but only after your theories turned out not to be absolutely nuts. They also told me that" he paused, fiddling with a piece of machinery that was of Jane's usual design of being held together with duct tape. "you were having difficulty rebuilding."
"That one was there before the jack booted thugs made their way through our junk yard," Darcy contributed, referring to the object in his hands.
Tony just raised an eyebrow and set down the contraption. "I'm here to offer research funding and unlimited access to any of the facilities in Stark Tower. Newly completed. Very shiny."
Jane paused, her demeanor immediately weary. "And what would you get out of the deal?"
"Besides stealing you away from Shield? I get one of the top scientists in her field as part of my on-site team." He glanced over at Darcy. "And her assistant, the charming Double D."
"It's Darcy, dude." She threw a blueberry at him.
He shrugged. "We got a deal, Galileo?"
Jane took a moment to consider, or pretend to consider, because she wasn't blind to fact that she could really use the funding, and she wasn't too proud to accept it if it meant getting Thor back sooner. "I believe we have a deal Mr. Stark."
Anthony Edward Stark was a man who did good things, but that didn't necessarily make him a good man. He'd made many mistakes over the course of his lifetime, and he'd made many premeditated and intentional decisions that he would later come to view as mistakes.
Some of his mistakes weren't as bad as some of others. Hacking into the pentagon? That was a small thing, something that he might still do today out of boredom; maybe change the screensaver of every computer in the building to a picture of a tiny kitten dressed like Iron Man or something. Then there were the mistakes he would take back in a heartbeat, despite the fact that he couldn't bring himself to regret the results of their happening; namely, the whole Ten Rings debacle that led to his creation of the Iron Man suit and settling down with the woman he loved.
One such mistake was made following the death of his parents during a string of grief fueled bad decisions, where he took the physical pleasures in life in exchange for the emotional. Binge drinking and a different woman in his bed every night was the standard for years, and all it took was one careless night where the two had been mixed.
It was a great deal easier to pay off the press in the 90s. Information took much longer to circulate in a time before the evolution of instantly reportable news via social media, and it wasn't a difficult feat to nip unwanted leaks in the bud. If one mistake, Obadiah Stane, quietly signed over all of the parental rights to a child Tony had accidentally fathered, no one else knew the difference. And if he made sure to be extra careful after that to make sure the situation didn't happen again, no one mentioned anything. Tony'd never met the child; never even knew the child existed. The incident was so far gone from all minds that he never would have considered that the folder in Coulson's hand when the man walked into Stark Tower would hold the result of that series of mistakes from so long ago, but it would change everything for Tony.
"Phil!" Pepper greeted the man who had just overridden the security protocols – that Tony had personally typed letter for letter into JARVIS' programming – in order to access the penthouse level of the building and crash their celebratory fun times with his super secrety agenty reporty stuff. "Come in."
"I can't stay," he replied, oozing professional detachment despite the familiar twinkle in his eye.
"Phil?" Tony stood up, following Pepper – she was padding her way over to Agent Coulson, who had just stepped out of the elevator – a with a glass of freshly poured champagne in his hand. "Uh, his first name is Agent," he pointed out like it was obvious.
Pepper ignored him. "Come on in, we're celebrating."
"Which is why he can't stay," Tony half-heartedly argued, a tense smile on his face. He would play at being sarcastically uninterested, but he knew that if Coulson was breaking into his penthouse to personally contact him instead of just having a SHIELD lackey send a gift basket then things had to be seriously wrong.
As if reading his mind, he held out the black, leather case – thin enough to be a folder – that had previously been tucked under his arm along with a manila file that he kept. "We need you to look this over. As soon as possible."
Tony gave slight shake of the head. "I don't like being handed things." It was like Schrödinger's cat. As soon as he opened that file, it solidified whatever information was in it and made it real, which meant that he'd actually have to deal with it.
"That's fine, because I love to be handed things." Pepper offered him her glass of champagne, taking the leather folder in exchange. "So, let's trade." She reached out and nabbed the other glass from Tony's hand, placing the file onto the now empty appendage. "Thank you," she said, downing the last of the bubbly liquid from her new flute.
Tony was having none of it. After a pause, he started fidgeting with the new object in his hand and said, "Official consulting hours are between eight and five every other Thursday."
"This isn't a consultation," Coulson interjected.
"Is this about the Avengers?" Pepper asked as Tony flipped open the cover. It produced a release sound and the contents lit up on the tablet screen held within. She paused. "Which I… I know nothing about."
"The Avengers Initiative was scrapped, I thought," Stark huffed, turning to walk away from the pair, screen still active in his hands. "And I didn't even qualify."
"I didn't know that either," she quipped.
"Yeah," he continued, ignoring her. "Apparently I'm volatile, self-obsessed, don't play well with others."
"That, I did know," Pepper sighed, rolling her eyes in only semi-seriousness.
"This isn't about personality profiles anymore," Coulson informed them.
"Whatever." He snipped, tapping at the screen. "Miss Potts. Got a second?" He continued tapping, setting up the information to be downloaded onto JARVIS's servers. He glanced up when he felt Pepper approach. "You know," he said quietly to her. "I thought we were having a moment."
"I was having twelve percent of a moment." She smirked, but her face fell serious as she leaned in closer for more privacy. "This seems serious. Phil's pretty shaken." She turned her head to look back at the man in question before looking back at Tony when he gave his response.
"How did you notice?" he asked, facing her head on. "Why is he 'Phil'?"
But she was distracted looking down at the table he had lain down onto the table. "What is all of this?"
"This is, uh…" He swiped up on the screen using both fingers, extending his arms forward and sending holographs of the information onto the projectors in front of them for viewing. "This." Each screen held the information and video footage regarding the other candidates for the Avengers Initiative. Tony recognized the Patriotic Popsicle, the Green Goliath, and that Buff Space Dude from New Mexico. One screen, however, held the footage of a man he didn't recognize hijacking what looked to be the Tesseract; an artifact that Tony only knew about through his father's research.
Pepper let out a breath. "I'm going to take the jet to D.C. tonight."
"Tomorrow."
"You have homework. You have a lot of homework." She didn't even take her eyes off of the images in front of her as she spoke.
"Well, what if I didn't?" His argument was half-hearted at best. The seriousness of the situation was putting a damper on his previously celebratory mood.
"If you didn't?" She raised an eyebrow, letting her gaze fall on his pleading face.
"Yeah."
"You mean if you finished?" Tony nodded, catching her flirtatious tone despite the tense atmosphere. "Well, um...then..." she leaned in and whispered into his ear. He gasped dramatically, making eye contact with Coulson and enjoying the look of awkward embarrassment in the agent's face before he looked away from the pair.
That's what he gets for ruining celebratory fun time with this potential end of the world business.
"Square deal," he agreed with a curt nod as Pepper pulled away. "Fly safe."
She smiled affectionately, giving him a tender kiss before walking off to get her flight squared away. "Work hard." She waved goodbye to Coulson on her way out.
Tony swiped his hands at the screen with the mysterious scepter wielding villain, grabbing onto the image of the Tesseract and pulling it out in holograph form. He turned around to face Coulson, who was still standing in his doorway.
"What do you want, Secret Agent Man?" he asked, crushing the image of the Tesseract, which scattered the fragments that remained and sent them floating back to the holographic screen he'd taken them from. "You've already delivered me the goods, no need to stick around for tea."
Coulson, unfettered by the attitude being sent his way, pulled out the manila folder that Tony had noticed earlier. "I actually have more information for you regarding a different topic; some particulars regarding Jane Foster's intern that we feel might be pertinent to you given recent developments. Hard copy only, that way you can dispose of the documents should you feel that you… don't want this information shared."
"You did a background check on my employees?" He didn't touch the folder that was being held out to him. Another Schrödinger's cat situation, and the last one had already been a doosy.
"We'd already started the process before you picked them up." From under our nose was implied.
Tony's relationship with Darcy Lewis was an intricate one. They both played as casual sarcasm and scathing but playful remarks. She was one of the few people in his life that he had taken an instant liking to, and from that very first moment in the New Mexico desert when he'd walking into Jane Foster's lab he was rooting for her. Jane herself wasn't so bad, but Darcy was still so young. She was really only just starting to make her way into the world and he, for some crazy reason, wanted to see her succeed, so instead of just offering a job to Jane like he had originally planned, he extended a place to her sarcastic assistant at well. His paternal affection for the woman was something that surprised him, and it was something that neither openly acknowledged. Though Jane had commented once how she wouldn't be surprised if he stole her ex-intern to do bigger, better things within the Stark company.
Tony stared at the folder in Agent Coulson's outstretched hand for a moment, eyebrows furrowed. He made an important, life-changing decision then and there. He took a deep breath before reaching out to grab the file and flipping it open to the first page.
Darcy draped herself over Jane's desk, bumping the scientist's still scribbling hand off of a slightly wrinkled piece of paper "You need to get laid."
"Darcy."
She propped her chin up using the palm of her right hand, using the left to nab the pen from Jane and making sure that her elbow covered a good chunk of the paper that the older woman had been working on. With this new angle she was able to return to a half seated position on to her favorite spin-y stool while still impeding her pet scientist's work. "No, I get it. You're saving yourself for Space Prince."
"Darcy–"
She sighed, rolling her eyes. "Well, I need to get laid at least."
"Darcy!"
"What? All I'm saying is that it's been a while and my girl bits are starting to get restless." She wiggled her hips to emphasize her point
Jane sighed at her antics and massaged the crinkle out of her own forehead with the side of her thumb. "Darcy, I really need to focus. I've almost figure out—"
"Nu-uh. Jane, you are required a 45-minute break for every six hours of work by law, and I am here to make sure that you get it."
"Darcy, the exact wording is 'entitled' to a 45-minute break. I don't have to take it if I don't want to."
"Oh, my mistake. Jane, you are required to take a 45-minute break for every six hours of work by me, and I am here to make sure you get it."
She looked like she was getting ready to argue again but the pair was interrupted by Tony sauntering in. "Do you two realize you say each other's name in almost every sentence? Are you not sure who you're talking to?"
"Naw, man." Darcy spun around in her stool, overshooting by a stretch and needing to wiggle back around the opposite direction to face the genius, but not before knocking one of her knees against her boss's desk. "Jane has this habit of talking to herself while she's working and I used to get confused and think she was talking to me. I just started ignoring her until she said my name, and then I started doing it back to make fun of her, and now it's just kind of stuck."
"I didn't pay attention to a single word you just said, Lewis." Tony's smirk couldn't quite hide the unusually serious look in his eyes.
She grinned. "Yeah, you did, and you're going to use that genius mind of yours to somehow take this new information and use it as a form of future embarrassment or blackmail."
"Yes, I am." He stared that the taser toting brunette just long enough for the silence that invaded the room to become awkward, something that had never really happened between the two of them before. It threw Darcy off a bit.
"So… the lights flickered a little while ago." She said, attempting to get the conversation back to its usual flow of back-and-forth sarcastic banter. "Let me guess. Science! made something go boom up in Stark Land."
Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Tony gave a distracted answer instead of throwing the ball of sass back into her end of the proverbial court. "We disconnected the tower from the city's power grid. We're fully self-sustaining now." As per custom, Tony pulled out a snack size bag of blueberries out of one of his invisible pockets and tossed it to the former-intern-turned-payed-assistant before addressing the head boss-lady of the lab.
"You're enabling her addiction," Jane sighed, giving up on getting any work done in the near future. Between Darcy and Tony, she would be bugged and distracted until Darcy forcefully kicked her out of the lab at the end of the day by having Jarvis turn off all the overhead lights then lock the door behind them when Jane scampered off to find a portable illumination device.
Darcy gasped, waving her free hand in front of her chest dramatically. "Was that a joke, Janie dear?"
"Don't get used to it. I'm hoping if I appease you then you'll let me finish my work."
"No-can-do, Galileo. You've got places to be. Chop, chop." He snapped his fingered in time with each "chop".
"What are you talking about, Tony?"
"I mean, it's vacation time. You've saved up enough, probably, and I'm sending you far away to do whatever vacation-y things it is that non-billionaires do. My treat."
Both women sat in silence; Darcy in awe and Jane in suspicion. "Why?" the younger woman asked.
It was as if drawing his eyes over to look at her was simultaneously impossible to resist, yet the hardest thing that he had ever had to do, but he did it. "There's a bit of a situation that needs to be handled by us big bad superhero types. SHIELD wanted me to send you guys to Norway under some fake guise of a research project, I figured if I'm gonna send you somewhere to keep you safe I might as well make it a fun time.
Jane was having none of it. "What kind of a situation?"
"The kind that involves a magic man with a battery box and a powerful stick that can bend you to his will."
"I'm pretty sure there's an innuendo in there somewhere," Darcy announced, standing up with a huff. "But I've had enough of magic men and their destructive tendencies, so unless this involved my main lady's main man, Thor, I'm all for vacation time."
When Tony didn't immediately respond, Jane's suspicion tripled. "It doesn't involved Thor, right?"
He gave an over-dramatic sigh. "Not directly." He continued before Jane could further interject. "However, according to the data that Patches and the SHIELD Squad sent my way – which I did not tell you about – his crazy horse-fucking brother is here to send his regards in boot-vs-ant fashion."
"Oh," Jane seemed to be at a loss for words. "And Thor… he–"
"Hasn't shown up in a blazing fury to kick some Asgardian ass, no." Tony was getting fidgety. He needed to leave to finish preparing before suiting up and heading out, but he had to make sure that these two women were one their way to safety first.
"And I can't do anything to help?" She was reaching for something, anything that would make her feel less like a damsel in distress.
"You can keep working on that Einstein-Rosen bridge of yours and stay safe long enough to finish it."
She stared at him for a long time before saying, "Okay."
Darcy's eyes widened. "I can't even get her to take a food break some times and after five minutes you get her to drop all of her work for a little fun in the sun? That is way not fair."
"It's one mad genius to another, kid." Jane made no response to his referring to her as a 'mad genius'. "Now both of you need to skedaddle off and get packing. The jet leaves in just over and hour."
"Wait, I'm actually going too?" Darcy almost dropped her blueberries. "I didn't actually think that I was." Tony gave her a look like she had just dibbled on her shirt. "No, seriously. Jane's all important and science-y and stuff. Plus, she's Thor's hot mama, and those are both good reasons why she might not be 100% safe just chillaxing here. Hell, if I were Loki I would totally target Jane." She looked over at her main science lady muttering a, "Sorry, Jane" before continuing. "I'm just the intern though, so why am I going?"
"You're not an intern anymore," Jane reminded her.
"I do basically the same thing," she replied.
Tony was at a loss for words on how to respond to her. He hadn't expected her to question the decision. Even Jane was just going along with all of it instead of arguing like she usually would. "You… You're obviously going to assist Jane."
"Assist her in vacationing?" her brow shot up and he panicked a bit seeing such a familiar expression on a face that wasn't his own.
"Yes." He mentally shook himself. Pull yourself together, Tony. "No more questions! I need you safe and that's that so get packing." He spun on his heal and raced out before either woman could fully register what had just happened.
"I guess… we should go grab what we'll need." Jane could feel the confusion in the air caused by the shift in Tony's attitude. Maybe it was just the whole situation with Loki, but she got the feeling that it was more than that.
"Yeah," Darcy murmured. "we should."