Darcy stares at the SHIELD files.

The SHIELD files stare back at Darcy.

Darcy imagines the files spontaneously combusting in a cloud of flames, the paper turning black and crinkling as they fly into the air and float way.

The files don't do anything like that, because they're files, and for some reason this fact isn't making its way fully into Darcy's brain.

When Darcy had recovered from her (completely understandable) breakdown on the carpet in front of her door, she dragged herself into her tiny kitchen where she promptly opened her cupboard and dug out her Emergency Supplies. There was a stash for any occasion. Fail a major exam? Have some Girl Scout cookies. Terrible night at work and no tips? Godiva is really the only way to go. Accidentally kiss a cute guy who wasn't as into you as you thought (it happens)? There's a wonderfully expensive and chug-worthy Burgundy in the back.

Take part in a robbery of a government facility and end up confronting the world's most wanted super villain while simultaneously stealing top-secret files belonging to a covert shadow organization that employs superheroes?

Well, that's really a tequila type situation. Lots and lots of tequila. And ice cream.

Darcy collapsed on the floor in front of her couch, tequila bottle in one hand and a pint of Phish Food in the other, and resisted the urge to turn on her television. She put up a pretty good fight for about ten minutes, but eventually the combination of sugar and alcohol had her inhibitions being lowered enough that she barely fought herself when she clicked it on the news. Thankfully, said sugar and alcohol also made her less anxious (of less prone to caring about being anxious, same difference) so she didn't completely freak out when the only thing on the news channel (on any local channel, and a few national ones) was the explosion at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Eventually she gave up flipping through channels and settled in on the local KOB-TV news. An anchorwoman is standing in front of the Base, well down the street from that Base actually, its outline visible in the distance along with a plume of grey smoke drifting towards the sky.

"Authorities are still not saying what happened inside the Base, but they are urging everyone to stay as far away from the scene as possible. You can see that they've made us move farther back, and we've been told that police have been setting up road blocks at major intersections."

Darcy has been holding out some small measure of hope that whatever caused the explosion inside the Base was really and a freak accident, that Loki was just a figment of her imagination, and that she'd actually only accidentally been drugged and had a wicked acid trip or something. The pain in her legs, the bruising on her hip and the nasty red hand-print on her wrist beg to differ, but it's worth a shot, and Darcy will go with self-denial in a pinch if it helps ease the clenching in her gut and the welling of tears in her eyes.

"No one is saying for certain whether the explosion is from an attack, but one can't help but wonder. Viewers will of course remember that the last time the State mandated the lock-down of all military Bases was during the alien attack on New York City, where countless innocent people were killed and billions of dollars in property damage sustained…"

It's all too real, unfortunately.

Darcy looks again at the files scattered across the floor just inside her doorway. It's almost unbelievable, how those pieces of paper are more deadly than anything inside that entire room that they were in. It's her fault, she knows, for picking up the files. If she hadn't, they wouldn't have caught her interest, wouldn't have caught Vincent's and eventually Shannon and Mark's, and they wouldn't have landed her in the situation she's in now – not knowing if SHIELD will be coming to kick down her door any second to take them back.

The mysterious explosion, Loki showing up, and creepy office ladies are just the icing on a really fucked up cake at this point.

Which leads Darcy back to where she's at in this most unfortunate turn of events. At the very least she has the U.S. Government to worry about, and once the feds start looking at all the evidence from the explosion they'll no doubt want to question the mysterious group of "interns" who happened to show up right before it went off. So there's that.

But there's also SHIELD, who may or may not already be on their trail, may or may not already know that Vincent, Mark, Shannon and she have gotten their hands on these files that they no doubt want to keep hidden. If SHIELD does know, then that means that they have only a limited window of opportunity to make whatever escape attempts they can. If SHIELD doesn't, the files being inside the Base that just had a major freaking explosion will turn them on to it any minute, so a quick escape is still the best option.

Assuming, of course, that escape is really the best choice.

Darcy likes to think that she's a pragmatist on her best days, and taking part in insane plans to rob the U.S. government aside, she's usually pretty practical. She was inside a secure government facility at the same time as a mysterious explosion that's since drawn national attention, the same time as a notorious super villain who hasn't been seen since he showed up riding into New York on the back of a giant scaly space whale, and is now in possession of one-fourth of a set of files belonging to a very shady pseudo-government organization who caught said super villain and has since dropped off the radar. Math wasn't Darcy's best subject in school, but deductive reasoning is a well-learned art of a waitress whose tips depend as much on scheming as service, and she knows that the most logical outcome to this scenario is that she will end up being caught.

The question placed before her now, as she sits on the floor in front of her couch, ice cream melting into the carpet and a less-heavy bottle of Don Julio balanced precariously on her coffee table, is whether or not she wants to know what's inside the files before they catch her.

That choice can go either way, Darcy thinks. If she doesn't know what's inside the files then she can plausibly deny that she knows anything about them when SHIELD questions her (and yes, she's thinking of a torture-type scenario, and she doesn't plan on trying to hold out longer than necessary, or at all actually). Maybe ignorance will save her from getting her fingers broken or ending up floating in a river somewhere.

On the other hand, knowing what's in the files could be used as leverage, and there's a simultaneously stupid and dangerous thought if she's ever had one. Entertaining the very idea of playing the 'I know something you don't know' game with SHIELD is definitely very, very stupid. And yet…knowledge is power. If she knows what SHIELD is trying to keep hidden, maybe she can use it as a bargaining chip when the time comes and beg for leniency. Like a "see, I saw all your super secret information and I still didn't rat you out, doesn't that warrant jail time instead of a painful death?" That option is slightly more appealing than the former, but Darcy knows that it's probably due less to her awesome reasoning skills and more to the fact that she's already seen a little bit of what's inside the files and they're tugging at her brain and nearly driving her crazy with interest.

Resigned, Darcy drags herself off the floor and starts half-crawling, half-walking towards the scattered files, determination solidifying with each step and a persistent ignoring of the little voice in the back of her mind that's whispering:

'Curiosity killed the cat'

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Two hours later and Darcy is still sitting on the floor by her couch, though this time the files are arranged in a neat pile on the coffee table in front of her. The tequila bottle is still there too, but Darcy had given up on drinking from it a while ago, and it's safe to say that her apathy-induced buzz has fled the building along with her appetite for self-pity appeasers of sugar and alcohol.

It's been replaced by a strange combination of wonder and fear, though overall shadowed by utter self-resignation.

The files had been interesting (understatement of the fucking century), and Darcy's mind is still reeling with what little bit of information she had been able to understand.

Apparently the attack on New York six months ago and change had been all been because of something called the Tesseract.

What is the Tesseract? Darcy has no fucking clue, but she does know that it looks to be some sort of infinite power source that SHIELD was studying. Why they were studying it? Again, no fucking clue, but apparently their conclusions were (in her layman understanding of all things science-y and math-ish) that it was super freaking powerful. There were reports in the files from scientists who appeared as if they were having some sort of nerdy wet dream all over the page, talking about the Tesseract's potential to be harnessed as a source of energy for everything from weapons to environmental control, to speculations on how the existence of the device could potentially uproot the current balance between the United States and countries with large oil reserves, and how its use should both simultaneously be implemented right away and after a more thorough exploration of its potential.

One of the reports with a dissenting opinion of using the Tesseract right away made Darcy jump about five feet in the air when she saw that it had been written by Dr. Erik Selvig. Clutching the report with shaking hands, Darcy read how Dr. Selvig first came into contact with the Tesseract about a week after when he and Jane had disappeared off the face of the earth, and it looked like he had been in direct contact with it ever since. Until, it seems, he went AWOL for no apparent reason and hooked up with Mr. Leather and Buckles and tried to use it to destroy New York City.

The reports stopped suddenly right after that, and Darcy was left holding the set of files like an unfinished chapter at the end of a completely unsatisfying finale to a story.

So Erik was with SHIELD.

Darcy remembered Erik during her internship and had always thought he was kind of a dick. Of course, she had thought at the time that it may have been because he was actually expecting a legit science intern to show up and instead got Darcy, but now that she knows he's working with SHIELD and they stole her iPod, it makes total freaking sense. As to why he went and hooked up with Loki to use the Tesseract against New York…well that's another dead end.

So now Darcy is left with a pile of SHIELD reports and diagrams that tell a small part in a clearly long, convoluted, and fucked up account of the alien attack on New York. Is she better for the experience? Not really, actually, unless her account of the Tesseract and SHIELD is somehow damning evidence, which it's probably not. She seriously doubts that her testimony regarding 'some kind of super box-thingy with magic powers' and 'lots of scientists saying science-y things about what could happen but not actually what happened' would be taken too seriously.

Darcy sighs and runs her fingers through her now wig-less hair. Only she would be lucky enough to get saddled with the portion of covert files that contain absolutely fucking useless information.

She considers taking another drink from the bottle of tequila, even though that's not what she really wants to do, and is in the midst of reaching for it when her cell phone rings. She falls forward into the table, crashing into the cornered edge with her hurt hip.

"Son of a fucking bitch!" she yells. The phone continues to ring despite her profanity, and she looks at the screen and sees that the call is from Shannon.

Darcy hesitates. Should she answer the phone? Isn't not talking to each other the best thing to do right now, since they're split up and all? But what if it's an emergency - like, more of an emergency than the situation they're already in? Would Shannon really call her unless it was absolutely necessary?

Darcy thinks that no, she wouldn't, and resists the urge to heave a melodramatic sigh when she answers the phone and Shannon's shrieking voice confirms how right she is.

"Shannon, calm the hell down! I can't understand a word you're saying" Darcy says.

"Oh Darcy," Shannon cries. "They got Vincent!"

Darcy feels her stomach clench in cold dread, and she fears that she already knows the answer even as she asks, "Who got Vincent?"

"I don't know!" Shannon sobs. "Mark and I took Vincent home after you, and Mark told me to go and start packing my stuff, and he was gone for a long time but he just showed up now, and Darcy you should see how he looks, I've never seen him like this." She pauses, coming up for air before continuing at breakneck speed. "He looks like shit, Darcy, his lip is bloody and he's got a broken arm or something. He said that these guys in black suits showed up and wanted to arrest Vincent, but that they fought and beat him up when he wouldn't go with them. Mark only just got away, but he says they're coming here…"

Darcy is holding the phone far away from her ear, but she can hear as Shannon breaks her composure entirely into incoherent heaves and snivels.

"Shannon," Darcy says tightly, her chest compressing so she feels like she can't breathe. "You guys need to leave right away. Get out of Albuquerque, out of New Mexico, and just go…just go to New Orleans. Go get married, do what you were gonna do in the first place –"

"But…" Shannon begins.

"Just...Shannon, you have to try to do what you wanted. Otherwise all this shit is for nothing."

Shannon doesn't say anything for a long time, and if Darcy couldn't hear her heavy breathing on the other end of the phone she would have thought Shannon had hung up.

Finally Shannon speaks, in a voice so quiet that Darcy has to press the phone closer to her ear to hear her.

"I don't want leave you Darce."

Darcy feels the tears as they start to fill her eyes, her cheeks heating up and she worries her bottom lip between her teeth. The pressure in her chest is suffocating, and she has to pull out every last trick in her book and years worth of practice in not caring to stop herself from breaking down completely.

"I'll be fine," she says with a conviction she doesn't really feel. "Just go. Please."

Silence fills Darcy's head, from the stillness of her apartment to Shannon's subtle breathing on the other end of the phone.

I'll be fine, she repeats to herself. I'll be fine.

Shannon sighs and mutters a quiet "okay". But before Darcy is about to hang up the phone, Shannon says "Darcy, we're going to the Nouvelle Vie chapel…in five days, if we can…we'll be there."

Shannon hangs up before Darcy can say anything.

And really, what is she going to say?

Darcy hesitates maybe for five minutes as she wrings her hands and suddenly can't decide what possessions are important, what's worth leaving behind or what would look suspicious if (when) someone comes to her apartment and searches through her belongings. The files go with her of course, as does a small duffel bag with toiletries, her taser, pajamas and a pair of jeans and a few t-shirts. Her pictures of her family go with her too, along with a staff-party photo of her and Shannon from last year's Halloween party.

Anything that Darcy has ever heard can be used to track a person – her phone, her computer, everything electronic stays behind.

She locks the door to her apartment and looks back in the rear viewer one time as she gets in her car and drives. She drives until she hits I-25 and keeps going south until long past the red and orange sunset have faded into a dark New Mexico night and the only things lighting her way as she speeds past open fields of spotted shrubs and endless plateaus is the moon shining bright above.

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See, here's the thing about crazy super villains from outer space. They're crazy.

Usually Darcy would be totally okay with it. She understands. Things are really shitty for everyone right now, economy and politics and all, and for a man who's put a lot of time and energy into holding the number one spot of SHIELD's Most Wanted, you really can't expect that he'd take the (totally accidental) usurping of his coveted spot lying down. Or standing up, as it were.

"Can I say I'm sorry one more time? Or is it totally old by this point?"

She's sitting on a bed, a really shitty bed in a cheap motel room that she rented on a whim a few hours ago. Driving cross-country is hard, and while she probably would never have stopped at a place like this before, the overwhelming desire not to crash her car and die made her decision to pull over that much easier.

Plus (and she'd be lying if she didn't acknowledge that this factored in a little bit) it does look like the kind of place that people in the movies stay at when they're on the run from the law.

The Rose Hill Motel, aesthetically reminiscent of an old Spanish mission with adobe walls and chipping red paint, still has Christmas ornaments hanging along the top of the roof even though it's been months. She was first drawn to it coming down I-10, the first sign of civilization that she'd seen since Fort Hancock. Gigantic flashing neon sign that keeps flickering the "No" in "No Vacancy" on and off, electric green cactus with waving arms wearing a sombrero (it's Texas so she's not going to ask too many questions), located in the totally inconspicuous town of La Cueva. The room was cheap and the little elderly man behind the counter didn't look too Norman Bates-y. All in all it seemed like the perfect place for her to crash for the night.

Her room is terrible, with tearing turquoise blue carpeting and pink walls. Pink. When she closed the door to the room the door stuck and she had to slam it to get it to shut properly. The window rattled when she did, and a baby in the next room started crying, and of course the walls are paper thin. The bed was a queen and obviously too big for the room, so she had to edge her way around it to look out the window. She could see the highway, cars and semi-trucks occasionally moving past, and her car parked under the only streetlamp on the far corner of the parking lot.

Room thoroughly explored, the first thing she did after she unpacked her bag was look in the bathroom and test the shower. To her utter surprise and after a hefty five minute warm-up, it actually appeared to work. She was completely stoked. Life on the road, even if only twelve hours, was staring to make her feel dusty. Her arm was sunburned in the worst kind of farmer's tan, her hair was starting to tangle at the ends and desperately needed to be washed, and she knew it was bad when it got to the point when she could start to smell her own B.O. It's not the best place she's ever slept, by far worse than the trailer she lived in for weeks with Jane, but for anonymity and fifty bucks she'll deal with it.

In retrospect, she's kind of glad that she decided to take that shower immediately after getting unpacked. If she hadn't there's a chance that she would have been in the middle of it when Loki showed up, and she didn't think that she wanted to be having this conversation while being naked. She didn't want to be having it at all, but hey, silver linings.

She was sitting on the bed brushing her hair, freshly showered and pajama'd in her vintage Captain America boxers and a black tank top, when he'd just appeared in the doorway, like a gigantic, tall, pale, angry bat.

Unfortunately, little things like walls and knocking don't seem to be a part of super villain manners.

"Because I am sorry" Darcy continues when he doesn't answer, "Really really sorry." She's not sure what she's apologizing for, but it seems like the right thing to do when a vengeful Norse God shows up randomly in your motel room.

He continues to stare at her, thin lips drawn tight in a scowl and green eyes bright with menace and just a hint of unstable insanity. She's legitimately scared and also not an idiot so she doesn't think running is a good idea. Not like she could run anywhere anyway, or fight for that matter (her taser is unfortunately on the table by the TV, which would require moving past the crazy dude to get to it), and begging for her life doesn't seem very appropriate so she's decided to keep apologizing until he either kills her or tells her to stop and hope that it takes.

"Look dude –"

"Silence," he hisses.

Oh, well, there we go.

"Shutting up" says Darcy. Then immediately "Oh shit, sorry. I should tell you right now that I tend to get all talkish when I'm nervous. Which I am, and I'm totally not afraid to admit that. This isn't one of those pretending to be tougher than I am shticks because I really don't think I'd be convincing at it…"

Loki's eyes somehow get more menacing and Darcy realizes she's babbling. "Dammit, sorry. Okay, now I'm shutting up."

Staying silent is easier said than done, however, as Loki draws himself up to his full height, which is really freaking tall and the fact that her room is tiny makes him look even bigger by comparison. He's got his Asgard armor on, sans helmet. The black leather ensemble is even more terrifying in person and in good lighting than it was on the news, all sharp angles and buckles with a hint of fabric that was once probably a deep forest green but now looks a bit mossy. Even though it's got scuff marks, jagged tears running through the leather and pale sand muting the rich black to a tacky grey, it only makes it look rougher. Darcy sees it in his face when he realizes that she's noticed how dirty his clothing is, and hey, not judging! He should have been here forty minutes ago and seen how filthy she looked.

Loki brandishes his arms out to the side, cape rising behind him in a green flutter. She's not too proud to admit that she squeaks a little bit. There's a swirl of green mist and his clothing is suddenly perfectly clean again, metal fastening glinting in the shitty lighting and hair perfectly slicked back. He seems totally fine with her barely-repressed shudder, and she actually thinks she sees the corner of his mouth quirk up in a faint little smirk before he's back to tall and brooding once again.

"I will only ask you this one time, mortal. Who do you work for?" His voice is both not at all what she was expecting and yet surprisingly fitting. Not light, but not deep either, and every word enunciated with the firm conviction of someone delivering lines in a play. It's not a surprise either that he's British (thank you every Disney villain ever).

Darcy blinks. "Um", she says, "The Velvet Rabbit?" She says it like a question because she's definitely sure his visit isn't related to her being a waitress at a strip club. "My boss's name is Shannon, so technically I work for Shannon…at the Velvet Rabbit."

Apparently this was the wrong answer, because Loki is suddenly right in front of her, leaning over the bed and causing her to shrink back as far into it as she can, which isn't much.

"Don't toy with me." He says, his voice dripping with disdain. "I am of limited patience and even less time. I will make this much harder on you if need be."

Darcy blinks again, and again. "Hey dude," she says hurriedly and holds her arms up palms out in a gesture of surrender, being careful not to touch him. "It's cool. No need to be all threatening and stuff. I'm sure this is just a misunderstanding or something. You know…like a failure to communicate." Because she just can't help herself even when her life is being threatened.

The reference goes right over Loki's head, which is probably a good thing, and he reaches out lightning-quick and grabs her upper arms in a death grip to end all death grips.

"Hey!" she yells, "What the fuck dude?"

"You presume to lie to me? Me, the God of Lies?"

"I'm not lying!" she says, and yeah okay he's probably not here because of her being a waitress and this probably has something to do with her small role in a robbery gone wrong, but technically it's true.

He narrows his eyes then closes them, hands tightening their grip a little bit more. Darcy's confused, and a spike of panic shoots through her, muscles tensing in anticipation and putting more strain on her arms. She thinks about moving away when he reaches out his hand to touch the side of her face, because she's seen Star Trek and she knows it's not exactly the same thing but alien dudes touching your temples with their fingers can only mean that one thing is about to happen, and there is no way in hell she wants Loki to do some freaky mind-meld thing on her.

Her struggling is moot at this point because he is really, really strong and he probably wouldn't listen to her anyway.

Then, suddenly but very naturally, she's floating. Her stomach registers the equilibrium shift before her brain does, flip-flopping a bit before settling into a wonderful numbness that steals over her entire body. She feels her breath as it leaves her in a big huff and her eyes slip closed. Distantly she feels her head fall back and her arms fall uselessly at her sides. It feels right though, like dreaming and endorphins at the same time, like Jello and chocolate cake (totally a feeling), like the afterglow of an amazing orgasm and a bunch of other metaphors that she can't really think of right now because, floating.

The tingling starts as a pinprick behind her left eye then travels throughout her skull, moving across her scalp like rolling water. It's searching and teasing but gentle so she doesn't really mind it at first. Then it's prodding and insistent and without even knowing why she's suddenly thinking about the morning of the robbery, remembering everything all at once in an overwhelming heap. It's too much too fast, like the pages of a book trying to be read all at once. Instinctively she tries to shut that train of thought down but can't, and now this has gone from nice and peaceful to fucking scary. The memory of that morning runs through her brain a dozen times, each focusing on a different aspect with intense scrutiny from various angles before she's suddenly right back in the bed and drawing a huge gasping breath as Loki releases his hold on her arm and stands back harshly.

"The fuck?" she mumbles articulately, blinking hazily up at his fuzzy silhouette, before her head tumbles forwards and she smashes face-first into the bed.