When Darcy wakes up, she does so with all the grace of a drooling toddler.

Her glasses are skewed terribly on her face, the lenses crooked and the metal arms bent awkwardly so that they immediately fall off when she sits up.

"Damn it" she says aloud to her empty motel room. "Those were my spares too."

It's light outside now, the early morning Texas sunlight filtering into the room through the grimy windows. The walls are pale pink in the light, not quite as garish as they appeared the night before. Her bag is still lying open at the foot of the bed, her taser still sitting on the table near the door and all her pajamas are still on, the girls are still safely hidden inside her tank top. The door is shut, the lock in place, and the only sounds she can hear are the chirping of birds and the faint hum of highway traffic outside.

It's like nothing happened.

Which isn't right, can't be right, because Darcy distinctly remembers being paid a visit by a very tall, very angry black and green wraith with an ensemble right out of Road Warrior meets Goth music video. She has a pretty active imagination and she's pretty damn creative (she's won The Velvet Rabbit best-costume contest three times already) but if she's going to spend time inventing vivid fantasies, they're going to be fantasies and she's going to remember every delicious bit of it, thank you very much.

Waking up in a pool of her own drool is not part of the fantasy package.

Loki had wanted to know who she was working for. She'd answered him honestly, he'd gotten pissed, and then he'd done some sort of Norse God Vulcan mind-meld thing on her and she fell asleep.

This, this was her life.

Darcy changes into the only other pair of clean street clothes she has as quickly as possible, not daring to spend any more time here than necessary. She's not getting the hell out of dodge fast because she's afraid that Loki might come back (apparently, if he wanted to he could find her anywhere). She's thinking more from the premise that Mr. Subtle-In-Freakin'-Armor was not too long ago just on the news, national news, riding a scaly monster alien army through the streets of Manhattan. He obviously got away from wherever SHIELD had put his ass after they'd stopped him and that means that they're most likely looking for him. She's not a criminal mastermind, like at all, and she's already got enough on her plate with running from the government and from SHIELD for her own shit, but she does know that putting miles between herself and Loki's last known location is definitely a good idea.

Sure enough, when Darcy steps outside the hotel, wearing her jeans, an Aerosmith t-shirt and a Lobos baseball cap with the brim pulled low over her eyes, she sees two nondescript black vehicles pull off the highway and park in front of the Motel's office. Two men in black suits and sunglasses step out of the first car, looking around as they do so, and Darcy doesn't even need that criminal sixth sense to know that these guys are part of some super top-secret government organization. Seriously, you'd think they'd be less obvious about it.

Thankfully, Darcy's car is parked on the other side of the parking lot from the Motel's office so she won't have to walk past the Men in Black in order to get out of here. Hefting her duffel bag on her shoulder, studiously ignoring the pain in her hip and the tweak in her wrist as she pulls the brim of her cap lower over her face, she starts walking towards her car.

Trying to be nonchalant is harder than it looks and Darcy, not one for being subtle on a regular basis, is having kind of a hard time not just saying "fuck it" and running to her car. She's almost there, literally five freaking feet away, when she hears one of the suited men call out to her.

"Excuse me, ma'am?"

"God damn it," Darcy curses under her breath. She briefly entertains the idea of simply pretending that she didn't hear him, of getting in her car and peeling out in a blaze of smoke and glory, but she's already stopped moving so that plan won't work.

"Ma'am," Suit Guy says again. "I'm from the United States Secret Service. I'd like to speak with you for a minute."

He says it like it's up to her whether she wants to stop and talk, but Darcy senses she doesn't really have a choice on this one.

She turns around and Suit Guy is standing right in front of her. He looks like he might be younger on the scale of professional-types, and definitely has that trim athletic body type and straight-backed posture. He's smiling, but with the combination of a crisp black suit and mirrored aviators it comes across less 'friendly' and more 'I could kill you with my pinky finger'.

Darcy clears her throat. "Yeah, okay. What's up?"

Suit Guy doesn't move his head, but Darcy can feel how he looks her over. The girls are a little bit more exposed than usual in that they're not hidden behind a sweatshirt, and her t-shirt is a little tighter than the ones she usually wears (it's been a rough month, okay?) and she knows her figure is the kind that any emphasis in that particular area is like a homing beacon. She's kind of glad actually. Not that she's glad to be objectified per se, but working at The Velvet Rabbit has taught Darcy more valuable lessons about the power of undisguised femininity than a mountain of books on female empowerment could. If she plays her cards right, she might be able to play this cool without actually being cool.

Suit Guy, while still being a guy, is a professional, and his once-over of Darcy is over in a second. Then he's pulling out a notebook from his suit pocket along with a pen, flipping over the cover and clicking the pen poised over the first page.

"What's your name?"

Darcy swallows, and can practically hear the voice inside her head yelling at her don't be an idiot! when she responds, "Why?"

Suit Guy doesn't answer right away, and Darcy thinks he might be surprised, which hey, so is she.

His jaw ticks a little bit before he responds. "The United States government suspects that a wanted criminal was last spotted in this area approximately six hours ago. This individual is believed to be extremely dangerous and poses a serious threat."

Oh. "Oh," she says.

That sucks. "That sucks."

Suit Guy continues, "Have you seen anyone matching this description?" He pulls out a photograph from his suit pocket and hands it to Darcy, who promptly drops it to the dusty Texas ground when she looks at it.

It's her. Well, not her her, but a picture of her from the morning of the robbery, head covered in that ridiculous retro wig and assets on much more of a display than she'd thought her blouse had actually allowed. From the angle the security camera obviously captured things, her outfit has been showing off a lot more skin and va-voom curves than she'd thought.

"Sorry," she mumbles, and bends down to pick up the picture. She stares at Suit Guy's shiny polished dress shoes, growing progressively dirtier by the second as the slight breeze kicks up dust, and wonders if he'd mind very much if she threw up on them.

He's looking at her strangely when she gets back up to eye-level, his head tilted slightly to the side and mouth set in a tight line that's revealing nothing, but it's enough to let her know that her moment of shock was probably the equivalent of waving a gigantic red flag while jumping up and down yelling "It's me!"

"Ma'am," he says slowly, "Do you have any identification with you?"

Darcy stalls, not sure if breaking down in tears would either help or hinder her chances of getting out of this without being arrested. She can try the puppy dog eyes, but if he didn't fluster at the girls (when he's clearly already seen more of them than he probably knows) then Suit Guy probably won't fall for those either.

She could run away, but there's no way she'd get very far. She'd probably end up tackled to the ground like those crazy people on Cops who think that running from the police ever works out. And with her luck it would end up on YouTube with a million hits, but she'd be so far locked in a windowless prison cell to ever see it.

A part of her wonders why she's handling this so badly. Wasn't it just yesterday when she was debating the merits of reading top-secret files while knowing that the end of the road was going to lead right here? Well, not here, here, standing in the middle of fucking nowhere Texas after having been mind-fucked by an alien super villain, but getting arrested was a distinct possibility. Darcy guesses that she can't really say she didn't have this coming.

A light spatter of water rolls down Darcy's cheek and she thinks that her eyes have started the crying thing without her permission, but when she reaches up to wipe it away another drop falls on her hand, then another one on her glasses. More drops fall in quick succession, spattering her glasses and drenching her hair and the photograph alike as it drops to the ground, and suddenly she and Suit Guy are standing in the middle of a rain storm of epic proportions.

She's beyond grateful, even cracking a small smile, because any delay of the inevitable is a reprieve and it's oddly fitting that her last minutes as a free woman wound be spent in a rainstorm that ruins the last of her clean clothes.

Darcy breathes in deep, inhaling the scent of dust and rain, a mixture of salt from the tears that have nonetheless crept from her eyes, and lets it out in a shaking breath. The smile is still plastered stupidly on her face and shows no sign of leaving as she closes her eyes and tips her head backwards to catch the torrent as it falls.

Her bittersweet levity is short-lived however, as a blinding flash of lightening splits the sky and is instantly followed by the loudest clap of thunder Darcy has ever heard.

xxxxxxx

Trying to explain to your former "friend"/boss, a God of Thunder, a mysterious science dude, and a government agent how you ended up becoming one of the country's most wanted criminals is, honestly, kind of hilarious.

It's uber-scary too, because now Darcy is smack in the middle of a pissing contest between what appears to be the actual U. S. government and a shadowy pseudo-organization pretending to be an even higher-ranking branch of said U.S. government.

"I have already told you, she is no threat to this Realm. She is a mere girl!"

The minute Thor had shown up he didn't quite recognize her, which was a little insulting because she had though they bonded better than that (she tased him, for crying out loud), but she will admit that she probably does look a little different since the last time he'd seen her over a year ago. When he finally did remember who she was (mostly because she yelled at him and said something along the lines of "I'd totally fry your ass again if I had my taser with me, you asshole") he grabbed her and pulled her into a bear hug of epic proportions.

"Lady Darcy!" Thor boomed. "I had hopes I would see you again during my time on Midgard!"

Darcy, at a loss for anything to say (most likely along the lines of "what the fuck are you doing here?") and spine re-aligned somewhere in the shape of two massive arms, squeaked "You too big guy."

Thor had clapped her on the back hard enough that she'd fallen forward in an ungrateful stumble, her ears ringing and vision blacking just slightly. When she came back up, Thor was explaining in a very haughty royal-Prince-ish way to Suit Guy that Darcy was a friend of the Royal Court of Asgard and was therefore under his immediate protection. Suit Guy, bless him, hadn't argued (probably less because he wanted to avoid a confrontation with a gigantic dude about a foot taller than him and more because said dude just fell out of the freaking sky) and promptly called his superiors. Thor in turn called Jane, who, after making several high-pitches noises from the other end of Thor's cell phone, immediately hung up.

So, about fifteen minutes after Thor's apparel-ruining reemergence into Darcy's life, a black helicopter touched down in the Rose Hill Motel parking lot, scaring the shit out of the owner and the hotel's other occupants and causing traffic on I-10 to crawl to an almost complete standstill. Sensing that they were making more of a spectacle than they probably should, and being pretty obvious about the fact that they were from a super-secret organization (again, someone really needed to write a Memo about inconspicuous yet obvious black vehicles) the party had moved itself inside Darcy's motel room.

She's sitting on her bed, almost in the same spot where Loki had cornered her not but seven or eight hours ago, staring at Thor and Suit Guy as they bring the black helicopter's new arrivals up to speed on the situation at hand.

Jane is here, looking as elegant and delicately perfect as Darcy remembers her being, brown hair swept over one shoulder and teeth catching her bottom lip as her wide doe-brown eyes sweep between Thor and Suit Guy with the swings in conversation. She hasn't said anything to Darcy yet, which, hey, whatever. Darcy gave up on that train a long time ago, somewhere around when Jane stopped answering her phone and all her emails came back 'undeliverable'. She didn't delude herself into thinking that brilliant and beautiful Jane had actually considered her a friend, despite the fact that Darcy had done all the stuff friends are supposed to do, like organize a drinking/ice cream binge when Thor disappeared after Puente Antiguo and played the role of hair-holder when Jane couldn't handle her liquor.

She had actually kind of hoped that Thor would forget about Jane, that going back to being a freaking God would overshadow a two-day crush on a mortal astrophysicist with a severe caffeine dependency. That Darcy's (she hesitates even now to call it jealousy) would have turned out to be an amazing sense of clairvoyance and not the result of angsty self-esteem issues. Seeing her here now, still with Thor after all this time, Darcy feels a clenching in her gut and is really, really disgusted with herself.

The man with fluffy dark hair standing next to Jane isn't as tall as Thor or Suit Guy, but he's got a quick eye that is belied by the rumpled nature of his appearance. He's taken off his glasses at least three times already and rubbed them between his fingers and the wrinkled red and black plaid shirt he's wearing, breathing deeply and exhaling through his nose in gentle yet exaggerated sighs. Darcy doesn't think he looks like a secret agent, although if he is, his cover as an anxious nerd is perfect.

"She's a wanted criminal, and here in this Realm, that means she needs to come with me," Suit Guy says. He's not backing down, which is pretty brave, and also pretty stupid.

"A criminal? Darcy?" Thor asks incredulously. "She is no more a criminal than I a frolicking minstrel." (And thank you, Thor, for the mental image).

"She and a group of her friends robbed a highly-secured underground facility and caused thousands of dollars in property damage!"

"Darcy did what?" Jane speaks up for the first time, chin up and blinking her eyes at Suit Guy. "Are you sure? Darcy?"

Darcy snorts before she can help herself, "Gee thanks Jane."

The three people standing in her doorway turn to look at her.

"Oh no", she waves her hand at them in a dismissive gesture; "please continue talking about me like I'm not here. I'll wait while you figure out whether I'm a dangerous terrorist or an incapable invalid who needs babysitting."

"Darcy..." Jane says, and the tone is that mix of disapproving with a hint of shy amusement that brings Darcy back to those weeks during her internship, just the two of them and sometimes Erik, bullshitting and talking about stupid B-movies and old TV shows, and suddenly the room has gotten as lot smaller and stuffier and her eyesight has gotten all blurry for some reason.

She didn't ask for these fucking people to show up out of the blue. She was perfectly fine on her own, and yeah okay she might have been arrested if they hadn't shown up, but still. It doesn't give anyone, especially Jane, the right to act like she's handling the situation badly. Just how is she supposed to handle it, exactly? Not everyone can run to their Norse god boyfriend for help, or use their super-brain smarts. Some people have to use (mostly) common sense and their instincts, which admittedly are a little lacking right now, but Darcy thinks she's doing a pretty freaking good job, all things considered.

"Look guys" Darcy says, taking a deep breath and taking off her glasses (fuzzy people are easier to deal with than in-focus people). "I don't know what you want me to do here. I mean, if I'm being arrested or something, don't I need, like, a lawyer? Or am I free to go because I was kind of on my way to see someone before he showed up." She waves her hand at Suit Guy.

"Where were you going?" Thor, Suit Guy, and Jane all say at the same time.

Darcy sighs, "I'm not going to tell you exactly where I'm going, but trust me it's not anywhere devious or dangerous...mostly."

Jane has that look on her face that means she's about to say Darcy in her Mom-tone, so Darcy, in the interest of getting this over with as fast as possible, quickly hedges with "I probably would be there already if I didn't stop for the night. You should be proud of me, Jane - I actually stopped the car before I ran over anyone." Ha!

Jane purses her lips and Thor smiles slightly as Darcy continues. "I got here, paid for my room, took a shower, then Loki showed up, and -"

"What?" Jane and Science Nerd this time, and the atmosphere in the room changes instantly from what Darcy thinks is funny bickering to sober and edgy.

Oops. Bad Darcy.

"Loki was here." Thor sighs in resignation, bowing his head gravely. "I had hopes the reports of his magic being used in this location to be false. It appears that I was wrong." He stares at Darcy for a moment, fixing her with piercing eyes, before quickly narrowing his eyes and tensing. "But he was in this room, with you?" Thor demands, his tone suddenly very, very serious, his face twisting into a severe frown coupled with a gaze of such intense focus and what Darcy thinks must be a warrior's threat that it makes Darcy shrink back a little bit.

Oh shit, she thinks.

"Yeah" she says meekly, and clears her throat. "He…um…showed up out of the blue last night, or I guess this morning actually. Don't ask me why because I don't know. He just…appeared, without knocking by the way, and grabbed me and asked me 'who are you working for'," which she says in a totally spot-on approximation of Loki's voice.

Thor doesn't look amused by her impersonation skills. In fact, he looks dangerous.

Suit Guy must have really good self-preservation instincts because he flips out his cell phone, dials it up, and mutter something about 'not getting paid enough to deal with this shit' before opening the door and leaving the room.

Nobody really notices him leave, and Thor is suddenly standing right in front of Darcy and towering over her in almost the same exact way that Loki did that it makes her flinch. To his credit, Thor seems to notice that his sudden move has freaked her out, because he makes a little rueful smile and kneels down gently in front of her, placing his large hands hesitantly on either side of her legs on the bed. It's weird being this close to him again, Darcy thinks, and to be honest even before she hadn't been this close to him. At least not close enough to see the small plays of emotions as they flicker across his face, the rough stubble of his beard catching the light in golden hues. Where Loki's eyes were green and full of anger, loathing, and what Darcy assumes must be bat-shit insanity, Thor's are blue and full of a righteous mixture anger and concern.

"Did he hurt you?" he asks her softly.

"No", Darcy says quickly, simultaneously wanting to reassure him and to break this freaky interaction that they're having. "I mean, he grabbed me pretty hard and I yelled at him, then he touched my face and I got all sleepy and my head started hurting..." She trails off as Thor rights himself and moves purposefully back towards the room's other occupants, bowing his head to speak with Science Nerd.

"Bruce...I would request that you examine my friend to determine if her injuries are severe," Thor tells him, sounding much more sheepish and in a voice much softer than Darcy would have ever thought possible.

Science Nerd (Bruce, apparently) is already pulling out a flashlight from his back pocket and says "Already ahead of you."

"Hey", Darcy says, panic filling her at all the sudden commotion, "I told you that I'm fine. He didn't hurt me, see?" She waves her arms around for emphasis and tries to downplay how the motion jars her hip and makes her wince.

"They're not looking for external injuries, Darcy" Jane says quietly.

It's the tone of Jane's voice, the widened brightness of her eyes combined with Thor's stoic silence as he wraps a big arm around Jane's small shoulders that really, for the first time in all of this, in the second most fucked-up morning of her life, makes Darcy afraid.

xxxxxxx

Darcy doesn't understand what the big freaking deal is.

"I don't understand what the big freaking deal is," she says.

She's doing that thing where she says exactly what's on her mind, literally, and there's less of a filter in place at the moment than usual. Normally she will make small adjustments, a "frick" for "fuck" as it were, but right now she's having a hard time controlling the part of her brain in charge of those little things.

This is mostly because she's currently really pissed off, and a little bit terrified.

Jane and Thor are huddled together by the motel room door, Jane with her face buried into Thor's chest, which with their height difference means that she's got her nose pressed somewhere around his sternum. He's holding her shoulders with his gigantic hands and gently rubbing them up and down her arms in apparently soothing motions. They look like a couple who's paid a visit to the vet and has just been told that they have to put their dog down.

Darcy is the dog in that metaphor, and hence their behavior is freaking her the fuck out.

Bruce has shined his little flashlight into her eyes three times already and asked her to look up, down, and all around at different points in the room. He's not saying anything as he does it, just maintaining that steady breathe in breathe out mantra that she's sure is intentional.

"Do you do yoga?" she asks him.

Bruce's eyebrow goes up in surprise, his mouth dropping open a little, and he stops the flashlight's movement poised in the air somewhere above her head. He looks at her slowly, confusion creasing his brows and a distinct look of apprehension crossing his face, and Darcy thinks that making random comments when someone is checking you for a head injury is probably not the best thing to do.

"You have rhythmic breathing," she explains. "You keep going in and out in too much perfect timing for it to be an accident." Darcy breathes in and out to match Bruce's cadence for emphasis. "I knew a girl once who went to yoga all the time, I mean she was a yoga freak, and she did that a lot when she was trying to not get pissed off about something. She did it a lot around me, for some reason."

Bruce still looks slightly confused, but his mouth quirks in a charmingly modest self-deprecating smile. Science Nerd is adorable, Darcy decides, as he shuts off the flashlight and pockets it, giving her a small little pat on the arm as he stands up.

"She looks fine," he tells Jane and Thor. "I don't see any evidence of neurological damage."

Jane un-wraps her arms from around Thor and moves to stand in front of Bruce. She clasps her hands in front of her and sucks in a giant breath. "Are you sure, Bruce?" she asks him breathlessly.

"There aren't any signs of anything resembling a concussion, which was the case in the last victim," Bruce assures her.

Jane and Thor look relieved, both physically relaxing with their sighs of relief, which hey, their concern is great and all, but Darcy is hung up on the last bit of what Bruce said.

"Victim?" she says, "Last victim? What the hell are you talking about?"

Darcy must have a knack for asking uncomfortable questions, because Jane and Bruce are suddenly looking anywhere but at her.

Thor, bless him, either doesn't understand the concept of 'awkward silence' or just doesn't care, as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone. Darcy is still trying to wrap her brain around the idea that Thor has a cell phone and apparently has mastered how to use it, when he places it in front of her and queues up a video.

"It would appear that my brother has inflicted great damage across Midgard as of late," he says solemnly. "When you spoke of his visit, I was concerned that you had been among the latest of those upon whom he has tried his hand, but it appears that we are lucky and that is not the case."

Darcy doesn't know what to say, and she opens her mouth like she's about to, but then closes it and subsequently drops it open again when Thor hits play on the screen.

It's a view of what appears to be a bank from a security camera installed somewhere over what must be the front door. It looks like a bank in that the floors are marble and the desk at which the receptionist sits is elevated off the ground by about three feet, making the little woman appear like a judge towering over court. She's sitting in front of a sliding metal door with a very large and very secure looking keypad on one side as well as a large sign with lots of symbols that interpretively mean 'Stay the fuck out' in any language.

Obviously this isn't a bank, despite the architecture.

The little woman on the screen is minding her own boring business for a few minutes, before a flash of light interrupts the scene and Loki is suddenly right there, wearing his full armor and helmet ensemble and standing in front of the woman's desk.

There's no sound on the video, but Darcy doesn't need it to know that the poor thing screams bloody murder, jumping/falling out of her chair and clutching her hands to her heart while simultaneously trying to crawl on her hands and knees as far away from Loki as possible. The man in question doesn't move for a minute, but Darcy sees his head cock slightly the side in a gesture that is uncomfortably reminiscent of a cat thinking of the best way to torture a mouse.

The little woman is saved, apparently, by the opening of a door off to the left of the camera's angle and the sudden appearance of a heavily-armed man who springs into action immediately upon seeing Loki. 'Springs into action' is probably what he intended to do anyway, because he doesn't actually get anywhere near Loki before said evil dude has him gripped by the neck with one hand and the other one coming up to grab the man's face.

Watching the video, especially this part, is making Darcy distinctly more and more uncomfortable. She flicks her eyes up to Thor standing above her, and he nods minutely for her to keep watching.

Loki's Vulcan mind-meld doesn't last as long as Darcy remembers hers being, but then again her recollection of the experience is probably overshadowed by being scared shitless at the time. When it's over, Loki releases the man and stands back, holding an arm out elegantly and expectantly towards the locked security door.

The man doesn't hesitate, simply walks forwards like he hasn't got a care in the world, like he hasn't just been man-handled and apparently brain-washed by a Norse god, and swipes his badge across the keycard access panel and steps inside. Loki follows, and (it makes Darcy clench her hands into fists in the bed sheets as she watches) before leaving the room, he bows to the little receptionist where she's huddled behind her desk.

The video over, Thor stands up and returns his cell phone to his pocket, looking at Darcy with an expression of mixed pity and sobriety.

Darcy tries valiantly, she really does, for about ten seconds to control the rapidity with which her stomach is trying to make its way into her throat, the turning of her stomach and the rapid-fire beating of her heart.

She blinks a few times, turns away from Thor to see Jane and Bruce staring at her somewhat expectantly across the room, before she launches herself from the bed and into the bathroom where she promptly throws up