Sorry for the delay in updating, life got in the way.
Thanks to my betas: Jen, Rhi, Twiggy and Lindsey.
Chapter Eleven: Bridges
Their first attempt to create a bridge was a failure, but since it didn't result in a black hole, Darcy decided it wasn't a complete disaster.
Not that she got to witness it. She was in the common area with everyone except Bruce. Jane and Erik scrutinized the data readings, she took notes, and Tony made sure the red flags coming up on SHIELD's systems were deleted before anyone saw them. There were two issues: building a bridge created atmospheric disturbance and energy readings that SHIELD were now familiar with, and the facility was also having to draw a ton of power from the grid for the experiment to work. Both served as a big red flag to their location and what they were doing—and there was less chance Loki would leave them alone when he realized they were repairing the Bifrost.
"We need even more power," Bruce said when he emerged from the lab, after everything had been shut down. "It collapsed because it just didn't have enough energy."
"I'm doing the best I can," said Tony, "but if I try to pull any more from the grid, it's going to end up blacking out towns. I can't hide that from SHIELD."
"What if the blackout had an entirely normal cause to explain it?" asked Natasha.
"Can you give us that?" Tony replied.
"Sure. Parts fail all the time."
They didn't make another attempt until a couple of days later. Tony made sure nothing had been picked up by SHIELD, and all the scientists reworked their calculations to ensure the attempt would work with the little amount of power they could pull. It failed again, leaving Jane in a foul mood and the others despondent.
"It'll work," said Erik. "We just have to keep trying. We almost had it—"
"And you'll keep causing blackouts," Natasha pointed out. "I can't keep sabotaging substations."
"We need another generator," said Bruce, "one that'll give us all the power we need."
Everyone looked at Tony. "I suppose if I built an arc reactor in a cave in Afghanistan…"
Natasha and Clint were dispatched to locate the parts he didn't already have, and Darcy was tasked with yet more data input. Nowadays she dreamed of numbers and Greek letters, when she dreamed at all. More often than not, she kept herself awake, pushing through her work or watching bad films late at night until she passed out. Anything was better than letting Loki surface during sleep.
When she gave him the chance, she'd find herself back on the rooftop, but with the steel sheets now a mile high and the flowers around overgrown, taller than she was, their stems bending to catch her by the ankle and pin her down. Loki would sit opposite her with a cup of hunangbrugga and that twisted smile. When she asked "Why?", he'd say "We were just getting to know each other." Then he'd force her to drink, pushing the cup against her lips while tipping her head back, his hand tight around her neck, until she choked. All the while laughing, cold and rich, like winter wind.
Exhaustion was the lesser of two evils.
From time to time she considered Natasha's words, but the fear that choked her in her dreams made it apparent she couldn't go back there. He'd been courteous before, but there was no guarantee of that the second time. All the while, she struggled to figure out what he needed from her.
In the end, on an afternoon where she'd been given her freedom while Tony and Jane tinkered with the machinery, Darcy sought Natasha out.
That was easier said than done, because usually she found you when she needed you, turning up in group conversations without needing to be summoned. Where she went the rest of the time tended to be a mystery. Darcy did two circuits of the facility, poking her head into closets and rooms she'd never entered before, and knocking on Natasha's door. Then she approached the stairs to the surface. It was possible Natasha was above ground, as Clint often was. As Darcy wished she was more and more.
"Thinking of escaping?" said a quiet voice behind her.
Darcy turned to find Natasha leaning against the wall, an almost-smile on her face.
"Looking for you, actually."
That resulted in a raised eyebrow. "Aren't they providing enough excitement for you in the lab?"
"I'm an assistant, not a referee. Or a robot. Sometimes I think they forget that."
"What did you want to talk about?"
"Him. Obviously."
Natasha nodded. "Come on. I know somewhere quiet we can talk."
Darcy expected to be led to one of the empty rooms, but instead Natasha cut across the common room, down the corridor with the sleeping quarters, and to the very end, where the generator room was. She took them past the humming machinery to a panel in the wall, and with a delicate shove of her shoulder, it came loose, sliding aside to reveal another room beyond it, its cinder block frame unfinished and raw. Darcy followed Natasha inside, who slid the panel back into place.
"More secret tunnels?" Darcy asked. Another corridor led off into the gloom, unlit. She'd thought they were the province of old houses in horror films, but she'd spent more time in them since Loki's takeover than any movie heroine.
"If you're going to build a secret facility underground, you need more than way to escape it," Natasha explained. She pointed to a couple of beanbags on the floor, discarded coffee mugs beside them. "Sit, no one will disturb us here. You can talk about whatever you want."
Darcy flopped down onto the beanbag and curled up. Now she knew where Natasha and Clint disappeared to when they wanted privacy. "I guess I'm just still confused."
"About what?"
"Why he took me. At first I thought it was because I would lead him to you guys, and then when he didn't, like, torture me, that I was bait. You'd come to rescue me and it'd all be a trap. And it wasn't so now I can't figure out why he even bothered."
"You know my opinion."
"No, see, even that doesn't make sense. We barely talked, so I hardly won him over with my winning personality. And I don't think it's just lust either. He never made a move, which he'd have done once I realized I was trapped."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Come on, he had all the power. He didn't even have to ask nicely—he could've threatened my family, could've locked me up somewhere much worse if I refused. There were so many ways to get me to do what he wanted, if that's what he wanted."
Natasha's smile indicated she approved of Darcy's logic. "Pepper and Jane remain convinced you're hiding something from us, that you're protecting them from some dark story."
"You don't."
"I know how to read people. He's scared you, but he hasn't hurt you. You give too much away with your body language."
"So you can tell, but they can't?"
"Pepper's a better judge than she believes. She overthinks things and lets it overrule her gut instinct. Instinct is rarely that—it's formed on the clues you pick up from the world around you. Jane spends too long locked in her own thoughts to pick up on those cues at all."
"What about me?"
"You rely on instinct, almost too much."
"Gee, thanks. I think you just insinuated I don't think."
"Not at all. You're good at figuring out what makes people tick and how to handle them. You just need to learn to judge your own instincts before you act on them. Someone like Loki could use that against you."
"I can't help it. I'm just me."
"And that's not a bad thing."
"Anyway, he definitely wasn't bowled over the first time he saw me," Darcy continued. "You weren't there—you didn't see the look on his face. He recognized me, and he wasn't happy about it. It wasn't instant lust where he felt the need to scour the Earth for me. I don't know what it was."
Natasha sat up straighter. "No one ever mentioned that. He noticed you when you were escaping? Did he say anything?"
"Just 'You!'. Then Tony ran him over with the car."
"That is interesting. You're right, I don't think we're dealing with anything like a schoolboy crush. Loki always has a reason for what he does, often more than one. I've been investigating it myself, but there's nothing on any security system for any agency. Standing orders to capture you and not to harm you, but no reason why. Not that I'd expect Loki to leave explicit clues, but there's nothing cryptic either. Without that, I keep returning to your link with Thor."
"Thor's not here."
"No, but I'm not convinced he's dead either. Loki needs leverage in case Thor does return. Their father sent Thor the last time Loki invaded, and this time he's stolen from them. I'm willing to bet that casket is from Asgard. If they find a way to connect to us, it won't just be Thor coming, it might be Odin himself. Loki needs a bargaining tool."
"So, not bait. A hostage. But why me? Why not Jane?"
Natasha shrugged. "This is only a hypothesis, and a weak one. Maybe it's because you fit the profile of the young maidens heroes are supposed to rescue. Maybe Jane's scientific skills are too useful to Loki to have to threaten her life. I don't know. And I don't like not knowing. But whatever it is, Loki has developed an attachment to you, and it's not healthy."
"I should stay down here until he's defeated, right?"
"I wish that was an option, but sooner or later, we're going to be forced out into the open. I guess we'll find out what his plans are then."
"Thanks for the reassurance."
"I can't give you that. But I can give the tools to protect yourself. Steve's training has helped you, but you need more. It's not enough that you can defend yourself in a fair fight. It'll never be a fair fight. You need to know how to avoid capture and to escape when you're trapped; you need to learn how to lie so well even the man who styles himself as God of Lies can't tell. You need to know enough to not become the damsel in distress."
"Can you teach me that?"
"I can try. If Loki's play is what I think it is, you need to take yourself out of the equation. Any hostage is a distraction from the fight, so if Thor doesn't have to worry about saving you, he can concentrate on defeating Loki."
"You make it sound so easy."
"Sometimes it is. I'll train you, yes. I'll come for you when I have time."
Natasha rose, and Darcy scrambled up from the beanbag. She wasn't any more at ease with the Loki situation, but at least she was going to do something about it. Natasha slid the secret panel open again, and Darcy waved goodbye to Narnia on the way out.
"One last thing," said Natasha. "You tell anyone about this place, and I'll kill you."
Darcy believed her.
A week passed—a week featuring two surreptitious sessions with Natasha, which revolved around psychology more than the ability to kill a man with her thighs. Darcy had taken a couple of basic psych classes at college, so she wasn't a complete novice, but Natasha covered new ground anyway. No papers written by dead men to read here, though the homework—practice telling lies and making them believable—was far from fun. Especially when Natasha deconstructed Darcy's method afterward.
"Don't chew your lip. That's your tell. Hold eye contact—but not for too long. Keep it simple."
It was little white lies here and there, things that mattered to no one, but it went against her nature to make up casual fibs. Keeping it secret from the others also sat uneasily with her, but Natasha pointed out the others would try and interfere out of a misguided sense of protection. This was a test of its own: could she keep her training a secret and make sure no one ever noticed?
The common room was empty as she padded in to forage for breakfast. She had a training session with Steve planned for later in the day, but he wasn't at his usual place by the computer. She ate her cereal, changed out of her pyjamas and headed to the lab, only to be brusquely told by Jane she wasn't needed that day.
With nothing better to do, she flopped down onto the sofa and hoped either Steve or Natasha would arrive for a session. When neither of them did, after an hour, she went wandering the facility again. Not looking for anyone in particular, just a little company. She hesitated before she reached the generator room; she could pass through and into Natasha's hideaway, but it felt like trespassing. Instead, she doubled back, once again finding herself at the foot of the stairs to the outside. There was no interruption this time. Steve still wasn't in the common room—no one was—so Darcy retired to her cot to read.
It was a day like so many others in the facility. Boredom and isolation. It just felt worse because she was turning twenty-two, and no one here cared.
She was alone, nothing more than a distraction to Jane and a cog in Loki's machinations. Even Natasha's interest in her was part of some wider scheme to bring down Loki. She hadn't seen the sky in weeks, hadn't seen her friends in months, hadn't seen her mom in nearly a year, not since she set off for New York, and she got to spend her birthday in a grey-walled cell, while the world went on around her. She succumbed to the self-pity and let herself cry. Quiet tears that wouldn't attract the attention of anyone passing by her door, but fat, hot tears that tasted of salt when they reached her lips.
When she was done, she crept to the washroom and splashed cold water on her cheeks until the evidence was washed away. She felt emptier and lighter, like the self-pity had been purged. Now she just felt silly for it.
She stayed in her room for a few more hours, opting to read on her cot rather than veg out in front of the plasma screen. Then Steve finally collected her for training after lunch, and she got to spend the afternoon taking out her frustrations on a punchbag. With endorphins doing their stuff, she showered and headed back to the common room for dinner.
The lights were out when she reached the end of the hallway, and she crouched—if anyone tried to grab her she wouldn't be where they thought she was. Something flickered across the room—the strike of a match, a tiny flame—and then an out-of-tune voice:
"Happy birthday to you…"
More voices joined in while the match lit candles, gradually illuminating Pepper at the table, surrounded by the other Avengers.
"…Happy birthday dear Darcy, happy birthday to you!"
She got to her feet and stumbled towards the table, clapping her hands as she spotted the cake the candles were crowning. "You guys remembered!"
"Of course we did," said Pepper. "I know when everybody's birthday is, except Natasha's. Now close your eyes, make a wish and blow out the candles."
When she was done, someone turned the lights back on. "What did you wish for?" asked Jane.
"I can't tell you that! It'll mean it won't come true."
"That's just a superstition."
"And making wishes isn't?" Her wish was pretty obvious anyway; defeating Loki. Though she probably needed more than twenty-two candles for that.
Clint had provided pizza again, and since they'd exhausted their original supply of board games, he'd picked up two version of Clue: Spongebob Squarepants and Sherlock. Natasha swept the floor with them all, but it didn't matter. Darcy went to bed happy, and for the first time in a while, her dreams were free of both data and Loki.
"Do these readings look familiar to you?" asked Erik. He'd just printed off a ream of paper and passed it to Jane. She scanned them and frowned.
"They match the original anomaly. When are they from?"
"Last night."
Darcy stopped typing. "Do you mean the anomaly that you found before Thor felt out of the sky?"
"Yes," said Jane. "I mean, these aren't precisely the same. But the patterns—are they from New Mexico?" she asked Erik.
"No, they're from here. The atmosphere above New York state."
Jane's eyes widened. "Darcy, get Tony. He needs to see this."
She sprinted down to the other lab where he was building the new arc reactor. Even she understood the urgency—if they were picking up signs that matched the original Bifrost, then that meant someone out there was building their own bridge. She explained that to Tony in a rush, then grabbed Bruce from the kitchen, where he'd been making tea.
"How did you even spot this?" asked Bruce.
"I've been pulling all kinds of data while we've been testing," explained Erik. "Both at the sites we know the Bifrost used to connect and here. I wanted to do a comparative analysis and see if there were any changes."
"Could this be something we've created?" Tony asked.
"Possibly, but I doubt it," replied Bruce. "There's a time delay, one that's too long to be naturally occurring. It's only raw data and I've not had chance to conduct a proper analysis, but top of my head calculations make it unlikely. It could be someone has picked up on our attempts. Maybe SHIELD have faked them somehow?"
Tony tore his gaze away from the data. "I'll double check the server logs, but considering we've been doing so much rewriting of their tracking data, I don't see how."
"It's Asgard," said Jane, her face lit with excitement. "They already have the technology, so they must be repairing their bridge too."
"We can hope that," Erik said, "but it could also be the invaders Loki is worried about. What we're doing might be acting like a beacon across space, and if they're already aiming for us, we're just lighting their way."
"Then that makes it all the more important that we connect to Asgard. How close are you to finishing the reactor?"
"A day, maybe two," said Tony. "I'm doing this on my own—"
"Could Darcy help?" Jane asked.
"Well, I suppose—"
"I know what I'm doing with a screwdriver and a soldering iron," Darcy said. "My dad used to teach me that stuff."
That was how she found herself soldering for hours straight, while Tony breathed down her neck to make sure she didn't fuck up. She was pretty sure that he redid a lot of her work when she slept, but it didn't matter. The next morning, after extra coffee, she entered his workshop to find him ready to turn the reactor on.
"All we have to do now," he said, "is connect it to the other machinery."
That took a couple of hours, and though everyone else was ready to get on with the next test, Jane had other ideas. "I checked the readings again, and the ones for last night. I cross-referenced them with weather patterns and predictions. There's going to be a storm tonight, and I think we should wait until then."
"Atmosphere won't make any difference," Erik pointed out. "We're only trying it out in the lab. Even if we were starting up a full bridge, it wouldn't make any difference."
"I know you're right. I just…I just have this feeling. And look where that led us last time. This all fits. I think they're going to try to connect to us, if they can."
Everyone conceded, leading to a tense day where they all bickered over what to watch on TV, what to eat, and who cheated most at Clue.
Night fell, not that they could see it, and according to the systems the storm began overhead. Darcy imagined she could hear the wind whistling and lightning cracking, but in reality it could have been dead calm for all they experienced under the concrete. Bruce retreated to the lab, Tony sat with the arc reactor to ensure it functioned, and the rest of them gathered around the machinery lugged out to the common room. Steve was given a program to run to disrupt SHIELD's servers while they performed the experiment.
"Did we start yet?" Darcy whispered, and Jane ignored her, turning dials and making notes. Though she'd been in the lab with them all this time, Darcy still had only the faintest idea of how this worked. Something hummed away in the background, louder than the air conditioning, while Erik and Jane worked in silence.
One of the machines began making printouts, spitting out sheets almost as fast as Jane could skim through them. Darcy didn't need to ask if things were going well: Jane beamed and chewed her lip, tapping her nails as time went by. Erik was more subdued, but even he became visibly excited as the minutes crawled by, smiling at the readouts as Jane passed them to him.
Then the machine stopped. No more printouts, no more numbers flashing across the screen, and Jane sat staring at the last sheet.
"Well?" asked Pepper. "Did it work?"
Bruce come bounding down the hallway from the lab. "Does your data match mine?"
"It does," Jane confirmed, then looked up from the paper and laughed. "It does!" She leapt to her feet, dragging Erik to his and gathering the two men in a hug. "We did it!" Darcy winced at the pitch of her excited shriek, but bounced up and down in her own spot.
Tony peered around the corner. "Am I missing out on a hug?"
Bruce gestured for Tony to join them. "We are officially the first people to create a stable bridge."
The room was a whirlwind of screeching, high fives and hugs for a few minutes, the jubilant mood sweeping everyone up—even Natasha and Clint. Darcy found herself doing a ridiculous victory dance with Steve—while an awestruck voice in the back of her head reminded her he was still Captain America—and then hugging Jane fiercely over by the machinery.
"Uh, Jane?" she said, peering over Jane's shoulder.
"—I'm going to win a Nobel Prize, I'm going to get all the funding I ever wanted, we're going to go down in history—"
"Is the machine supposed to have start recording data again?"
Jane froze and broke away, spinning around to read the screen. "Tony, did you turn the reactor off?"
"No."
"I turned all the lab machinery off," said Bruce.
"So where is this coming from?"
Erik scrolled back through the data. "This isn't from the lab. This is outside, from the atmosphere."
"It can't be—" Jane made a fresh print-out, then flipped through her little black book, comparing the new readings against old. "Look at this. It's the same. Almost exactly."
Darcy checked the date at the top of her scrawled notes. "That's the date Thor arrived."
"Holy shit." Jane threw everything down and ran for the stairs. "It's Thor!"
"Jane, wait!" Erik called. Natasha and Clint didn't even wait, taking off after her.
Steve brought up the security footage on the computer, scanning through different cameras. "Do we know where it happened?"
"It had to be using the arc reactor, right?" asked Darcy. "That's why our machines are picking it up."
"Makes sense," said Tony. "So close by, if not on the estate itself."
The screen showed Jane being pursued by Natasha, then empty fields, and back to the pair of them being lashed by the storm as they sprinted across the driveway. More empty fields, then a scarred circle in the grass, concentric rings burned away to soil.
"There," Darcy said. The circle was empty but there was no doubt it was a landing site. Steve stayed in that area, panning around the field. It wasn't easy to see in the dark, not with the occasional lightning flash flooding the picture. The field appeared to be empty, until they spotted a flash of gold. Steve swung the camera back and zoomed in.
"That's not Thor," said Pepper.
"Not unless he's made some serious lifestyle choices since we last saw him," said Tony.
The figure on the screen was a woman. Approaching middle-age, with an unmistakably regal bearing, she waited under a tree out of the rain, in a dress of gold silk that wasn't intended for a night like this. Her honey-colored hair was pulled back from her face in an elaborate set of curls with a long braid tossed over her shoulder, almost reaching her waist. At her waist, a dagger was tucked into her belt. Even if Darcy had only ever met one Asgardian before, she knew without a doubt where their visitor was from.
It was Steve who asked the obvious question. "Then who is she?"
