chapter 2! Also betaed by the fabulous Allie whose username on I cannot remember (though she is adalkia on AO3, go read her stuff), and the title is still from Ke$ha because there are still reasons, okay, cool. Hope you enjoy!
Dinner? texts Bruce, a little over a day later, and Darcy texts Jane: ohshit, dinner!
Jane responds, is it a sexy dinner? and if Darcy didn't know how smart her friend was- well, this is something to save for the inevitable tell-all book about SHIELD, if the government were to declassify the files. Which they probably will not, ever.
I DON'T KNOW, Darcy types, hitting the capslock key for each letter even though it's slower, because hey, she can't ask Bruce what type of dinner it is, can she?
Tight jeans are always the answer in times of ambiguity, says Jane barely ten seconds later, and that, at least, is advice that you can take to the bank.
Okay. You pick the place and time?
Tonight would work well for me, Bruce responds, and it's a quick response. She doesn't know if she should read into that or if he was just by his phone. He works with Tony a lot, he might pick up Tony's habits (god, she hopes not, or at least none of the more disgusting ones), at the very least he's probably more attached to his phone.
She's free tonight.
That sounds good, writes Darcy, and goes to splash some cold water on her face.
So. Dinner.
Darcy doesn't exactly- well. They're a thing, right? They're a trend, she had said that. Alternately: they're either friends who sleep with each other or they're some version of lovers she's not quite sure she's comfortable with. Because, when it comes down to the bare facts, the words exchanged, they're not lovers. She doesn't know if love is in the equation, not yet.
That sounds like something Bruce might say.
It's just- Darcy knows all the arguments, doesn't she? He isn't a man, not fully; he's volative and unpredictable, or is that Tony? But it comes down to this: he shouldn't be what she wants. And yet.
She pulls on tight jeans and a sweater she got with Jane in New Mexico. She thinks of how he held her, big tan hands against the pale skin of her hips, her waist, and how that could mean so many different things each and every time it happened. She pulls on her red Converse that were her moving to New York present to herself. Trend is a weird word to use about sex, isn't it? It's so analytical, stripping the action bare of the meaning, turning it into data, points plotted on a graph. Her hair can be loose, she supposes, and run her fingers through it, shaking it out. Bruce is kind of an analytical person, though, and that's his paradox, that's what makes him special. Makeup is red lipstick to match her red shoes and mascara.
Dinner, proper dinner, (and that's what this indubitably is), has even more implications than sushi, goddammit.
"My life is a fucking U2 song," Darcy mutters, and makes sure to flip off the lights and lock the door before she leaves her apartment.
She glances up at the mezuzah her mother put there as she goes, and that's something she doesn't tend to do upon entering or existing.
She'd told him she likes sneaking around with him. She doesn't know what she's going to say if he asks her what she meant by it.
When she'd said it, they hadn't needed words.
Get to the subway without thinking about this, she tells herself, and finds a good loud AC/DC song on her iPod to drown out anything and everything else.
They don't meet at a sushi place, and that's probably a good thing. They meet at an Indian restaurant, and she wonders if he picked it because it reminds him of before, when he was a doctor, when he had the illusion of being free even though his every movement and every breath were tracked by a team of agents.
It's up in Murray Hill, halfway down a side street with tables out on the sidewalk, and Darcy smiles when she sees the name: Curry in a Hurry.
"Never mind the name, I'm pretty sure that we can sit for as long as we'd like," Bruce says, and holds the door open for her. Inside, Darcy both flails around a little and winces, because who doesthat anymore?
Well, Bruce apparently does (unless it's because they're- whatever they are), and she supposes that Steve Rogers would also hold a door open for her if they were both exiting a room at that same time, but that hardly counts. People had manners in the 1940s. She assumes.
There's a Bollywood movie projected onto the wall, and Darcy takes a moment to gape at it as they're ushered to the upstairs dining area.
"Sorry about that," Bruce says, glancing at the movie and rubbing the back of his neck. "But you know, there's good food, I promise you that one. The samosas are fantastic, and I didn't want-" he cuts himself off, and looks down at his hands; Darcy knows he's going to say something about dates and expectations.
When they sit, she takes a long sip of her water and looks at him, and then she says, "you know, it was working before."
And that's a truth right there, plain as the nose on her face. They were working before, no matter how short the before was, or how messy, jagged edges smoothed by alcohol and not wanting to drink alone at what was supposed to be a party.
It was fine at her house, after they finished breaking in her kitchen table and eating sushi and drinking green tea he promised she would love (she didn't), when she almost slid off the table and he sat on the counter with an unexpected easy grace, stealing her avocado rolls and switching them with cucumber ones; Darcy had laughed and swatted at him and taken them back, and he'd wiped a smear of soy sauce from her lip with those rapidly-familiar darkened eyes. That was fine.
"You said you, um- you said you owed me dinner," she tells him, and that's when the waiter comes.
"Vegetable biryani," Darcy decides, and Bruce nods approvingly at her choice, then orders a mango lassi and chana marsala with a side of naan and rice. The waiter brings them vegetable fritters and a small platter of sauces.
"The green one is spicy," Bruce warns her, and then he falls silent, picks up a fritter and then puts it right back down.
It's probably not the best icebreaker, she feels like she's repeating herself, but- "I'm just not quite clear why you felt you owed me dinner."
"I think it was more that I felt I owed you a date," Bruce says calmly, quietly, but his fingers flex around the edge of the table. "Well. I definitely owed you more than a simple goodbye."
So there's that.
"I guess I don't like complications," she says.
And he says, "but I come with lots of those."
Maybe it's that Bruce is, for her, the unexpected one. She didn't expect to sleep with him once, let alone four times. She didn't expect to like him, because he has the Other Guy, he's the goddamn Hulk, but she met this shambling physicist-doctor in dusty clothes with a dusty heart, but there was room there, that was the thing. Except Darcy never intended to occupy it.
Accidental fuck buddy doesn't cover it, not anymore, and reducing it to a pattern, that doesn't either. Somehow (and Darcy might have once said, and that's the magic of it, but she isn't nine years old anymore and she now knows that love can be just as destructive as it can be constructive, just as constricting as it can be freeing), they're this unnameable, shiftable more.
Which doesn't give her anything new to go on, really.
"Who am I to you?" Bruce asks finally, his finger circling the rim of his water glass. "If I can presume to ask that."
"Yes," Darcy says. "Okay." She bites her lip and his eyes flick to it before he looks carefully away, at the Bollywood movie, the tablecloth, anywhere else but the dip and curve of her mouth. "You are... I don't know how to say this. You are a person that I like."
"A person that you like."
"Yes," she says again. "I don't know if- the secret thing I told you before in the lab, right, do you remember? I guess it's kinda that, but not really. You are a person that I like, but it's more that I want to keep you all to myself."
That, at least, she can say out loud.
"Funny," he murmurs. "I want that too."
Under the table, his foot brushes against hers.
Complications.
Right.
Those always happen, even when you try so hard to bury them deep.
His foot brushes against hers and she feels that thrill, even though there's no skin-to-skin contact, but she has the sense memory of it embedded into her cells and she knows what it felt like, to have every inch of him pressed into every inch of her. That's something Darcy has to savor.
He looks down again, and moves his foot an inch back, plants both feet firmly on the floor.
Darcy blinks, slowly.
"If we are to... be a thing, anything, Darcy-" Bruce looks worried now, unhappy lines creasing at the corners of his eyes and mouth, "you know how I am."
"I've seen your file," she confirms.
"I haven't seen yours," a quick smile from him, and she huffs out a laugh. "But it's- you have to understand-" his face contorts again and she wants to reach out and touch the lines creasing his brow, wants to smooth them out and fix things with the tip of her finger, if she was able to do that, if she knew where to begin- "I'm not, to put it frankly, not anymore of a- I'm not normal. Maybe I used to be, but I won't ever be, there's the Other Guy, and there's SHIELD, and there's people that want to use me, or they want to hurt me, or they want both at the same time, you know? And that can't spill over to you, I won't allow it. I will do everything in my power- but Darcy, I can't- I don't deserve- you deserve someone-"
"If you say normal I will, I don't know what I'll do but you won't like it and it'll hurt you somehow, I can make sure of that," Darcy says, words fast and furious, coming from a place stuck low in her throat. "You don't know what I deserve. You don't know what I want."
"But neither do you," Bruce says.
And that's true.
"I don't know if I want to be an asset for SHIELD," Darcy says. Her words are still sprouting from that other place, almost out of her reach. "I didn't- I still don't- know how much I want to be involved. But like, apparently I don't get to decide that the way I ought. And the danger thing, that's not on you. That happened the day Thor fell out of the sky, made eye contact with Jane, and Coulson realized what exactly he was dealing with in the southwest."
"If this is about control," Bruce begins, and she looks at him, really looks at him, at the lines on his face and the grey in his hair, wonders how much of that is from fighting, every day, all the little battles and the big ones too, one right after the other until one day he looked into his future and that was all he saw ahead of him, all he had to look forward to.
"I can't tell you yes or no either way," Darcy says, and suddenly she's tired, when did she get so tired. She pushes a lock of curling hair out of her face. "I think I just want you."
"I want you too," Bruce says, and in his voice she can hear finality and defeat layered and twisted until she can't tell one separately from the next. "I just-"
"Yeah," Darcy says, and breathes out and in and out again. The word just- it's an intensifier, isn't it, and she's so tiredof having to use it to qualify her meanings.
"This isn't really a solution," he murmurs, and she nods her head.
"Yes," Darcy agrees, "but let's get out of here either way."