Darcy Lewis - Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. or How I got a High Paying Government Job without even Trying

AN – This chapter will skip forward about six months in time, to show how Darcy is dealing with the whole time travel thing. It also will cover how I imagine someone with magic powers would get themselves the needed documentation in order to survive in the modern world, mostly through liberal and morally dubious use of Confundus charm, the Memory charm, Legilimency and, when necessary, the Imperius curse, I assume.

Just so people know, Darcy will not have access to potions, or the ability to brew potions. This will not be because of a lack of skill, but rather due to the ingredients either not existing in the Marvel Cinematic universe, or not having the same magical properties as they did in her original universe. Also, as Darcy no longer has a wand, or any spell books, magical artefacts, etc. She will need to essentially relearn all her magic from scratch and any new magic will be learned through trial and error.

This chapter does get pretty heavy at one point so with that in mind, I'll give a quick warning that it may contain triggers for possible animal cruelty, attempted rape, suicide, murder and some gore. I feel that it needs it for Darcy's character development, so she can become someone who can eventually work at S.H.I.E.L.D. a job which requires a certain willingness to get one's hands dirty.

Chapter 5: Fresh Start or How to Charm Strangers and Manipulate People

A yell of "Darcy, order up!" accompanied by the loud ring of an extremely obnoxious bell, reminded me once again why I hated my job. The reminder was punctuated by the six hundred pound land whale of a customer who made a slow, lumbering attempt at pinching my ass. Unfortunately, when you find yourself in a foreign country, seven years in the future, with no documentation or proof that you A, exist, and B, are in the country legally, one finds themselves, with somewhat limited employment options. It's either work your ass off for minimum wage and tips in a shitty diner, shake your ass on a stage in a shitty strip club for slightly better wage and tips, or sell your ass on a shitty (in this case, often literally) street corner for an hourly rate you set yourself, and frankly, the diner seemed like the lesser of evil of the three. Of course as the land whale again reminded me, just because I wasn't actually selling my ass (just my pride) didn't lower the amount of people making a grab for it. Fortunately, in the six months I had been in the future, I had managed to greatly improve my abilities with wandless magic, so a small pranking curse, one that caused hives to appear on the targeted area, aimed at every man's favourite place, gave me a small amount of satisfaction and a slight measure of revenge. The satisfaction was quickly quelled by a louder and rather more insistent yell of "DARCY, ORDER UP!" once again accompanied by the incessant ringing of that infuriating bell, broke me from my musings and spurred me back to my much maligned work.

"Just a few more days Darcy, a few more days and you'll have enough money to get home to England, just need to have a little patience."

In the six months I had been in the future, I had spent a great deal of time working towards returning to England. Of course learning it was 2007, instead of 2000 as it should be, put something of a crimp in my plans, but no one ever got anywhere in life without being able to overcome problems. So upon awakening the morning after I had discovered my temporal displacement, I immediately freaked out, I screamed, I cried, I cursed every god I could think of, from Jehovah, to Vishnu, from Osiris to Thor, and between curses I begged them to save me. They didn't. So, after several hours of that, I decided that my little breakdown wasn't very helpful in figuring out how to get home, so I left the motel, and after asking the receptionist for directions, made my way to the library. Three hours of internet research later, found me once again on the verge of a breakdown. No matter what I looked for, I couldn't find any information on the Granger family, no address, no phone number, no records of their having ever existed. Searching for the records or information on the families of any of the other muggle born students I knew, led to the same thing. As I ran out of options, I even found myself desperate enough to look for the Dursley's, but once again, the search turned up nothing.

"Ok, no Granger's, no Finch-Fletchley's, no Creevey's, and no Dursley's…still not sure if I should be happy about that last one or not…never mind I'm happy about it. Alright, so if I can't contact anyone to help get me home, than what do I need to get home on my own? I need money, first and foremost. That means either working, or stealing. As I don't want to land myself in any trouble with the American ministry, work is the best option. Second, I need documentation. Passport, ID of some kind, maybe a license. Getting any of those is going to be difficult. It's not like I can just walk into a government office, and ask for them…so that means magic. Confundus charm maybe? Imperius if I have to. Of course learning to it wandlessly is going to be difficult, but I've already proven I can perform some wandless magic, so it won't be too hard…will it? Either way, I'm not going to figure it out if I don't start trying."

With that thought in mind, I glanced around and began looking for someone to practice on. Spotting a librarian, pushing a cart of books to be re-shelved, I once again, began looking deep within for the well of my magic. Finding it I slowly pulled it up and focusing it on the librarian, sent it out, with the image of what I wanted it to do firm in my mind, a whispered "Confundus" sealed the deal. Slowly, almost hesitantly, I felt the magic flow though me, as if it was unsure of what I wanted from it, but as I watched I was ecstatic to see that the librarian paused in her work of re-shelving the books, and started pulling them off the shelves instead. My happiness was dashed when, after less than five seconds, she shook her head, glanced at her cart with confusion, and with a shrug began, replacing the books back where they belonged. Disappointed in the rather meagre result of my experiment, I sighed, before shaking it off, and began looking for a new target to test out my wandless Confundus on.

Several hours later found me, once again, somewhat despondent about my current situation. My Confundus had improved a small amount, but only a very small amount. Instead of lasting less than five seconds, it now lasted almost six, which was, I reminded myself, while not a great improvement, was improvement none the less. Sighing, I shoved my disappointment to the side, and decided I should start on the first part of my plan to get home. Namely, the part of the plan that involved getting a job, and earning enough money to buy a plane ticket to England. Not to mention earning enough to survive until I could buy my ticket home. With that in my focused once again on the computer in front of me and began looking for jobs in Charleston. I quickly found that most of the jobs available for a twenty year old woman, with no job experience or qualifications involved varying degrees of nudity. However, I did find several ads that didn't require and real ability, at various small cafes, restaurants, and bars around the area, so with a list in hand I left the library, and made my way to the first one. It was at that first place, a small bar by the name of Jo's Place that I made, what might very well be, one of the most important decisions of my life, though it would be a long time until I realised just how important the decision would be. The decision came about when the bar manager, a surly middle aged man by the name of Ted, asked be for my full name. I began to respond, in the same way any person who had lived by the same name for nearly twenty years would.

"I'm Darcy R…" it was at that point I trailed off, as I came to a startling realisation.

"Darcy Rose Potter. I've been Darcy Rose Potter, for twenty years now, and out of those twenty years, I only actually enjoyed being Darcy Rose Potter for about one of them. Darcy Rose Potter has been abused, hated, reviled, worshipped and ignored, sometimes a few of them at once, but never once has she just been allowed to be Darcy. Being here, now, I have an opportunity to be just Darcy! No more girl-who-lived! No more woman-who-conquered! No more chosen one, no more heir of Slytherin, no more Triwizard Champion, just Darcy! And the best way to be just Darcy is to no longer have the Rose Potter part. But that leaves the question, Darcy who?" Apparently this train of thought had taken me longer than I thought it did, and I was shaken from it by Ted's impatient voice.

"Well? Darcy who?"

It was then that I said two words that would become synonymous with who I was for the rest of my life.

"Darcy Lewis."

Why I just Lewis, I didn't know then, and I don't know now. Perhaps it was guilt, and a feeling of debt towards that little boutique I had stolen from, or more likely it was simply the first name that came to mind. But from that day forward I was Darcy Lewis. I just didn't know that it would be permanent.

While I didn't end up getting the job at Jo's Place, that little bar has held a special place in my heart ever since.

Eventually, after many, many, attempts at getting a job, I eventually got a position as a waitress, at a diner called Marty's Kitchen, the pay was crap, and the hours long, and despite my constant searching I never did find out who Marty was, but as the saying goes begger's can't be choosers. I found a small one room apartment, that took cash payment, and didn't ask any questions, and I routinely found myself digging through the trash at Marty's for food in order to save a bit more of my miniscule earnings, but after a little over a month I realised it would take me a long, long time to save enough to get a plane ticket to England. So after some wrestling with my conscience on the moral implications of it, I began confounding my customers, fooling them into pulling out a twenty instead of a ten, or a fifty instead of a twenty when it came time to pay. Doing so helped me improve in my abilities with wandless magic in leaps and bounds, and I soon began trying more difficult and more powerful applications. I knew that it didn't matter how powerful my Confundus charm was, it would never be strong enough to make a government worker suddenly want to add an entirely new person into government systems. In fact I quickly realised the only spell strong enough to make someone do that, short of torturing them, or threatening to kill them or their families, was the Imperius curse. After already getting over the moral implications of confounding people to earn more money, it was difficult to push aside my misgivings on the use of a curse that had been dubbed as unforgivable, so I began practicing it in much the same way the fake Mad-Eye Moody had demonstrated it in my fourth year, by making insects and small animals perform behaviours that they would never normally perform. Making cockroaches take baths in the sink, or making squirrels attack fat kids (I wanted to get some entertainment out of it) soon advanced to making dogs try and climb trees, or cats play fetch. After two months of practice, making it now a little over three months since my arrival in the future, I made my first attempt at using the Imperius curse on a human, though it wasn't entirely my idea at the time. The situation that caused me to use it on a human for the first time, also unfortunately, led me to my first and last time committing murder.

It was late at night, on the twenty seventh of September. I was walking to my crappy little apartment, after finishing up a late shift at work, when I was grabbed from behind. Before I could even realise what was happening I was dragged into an alleyway, a hand over my mouth and a gun to my head. In front of me, stood a man who, at first glance, seemed entirely average. To average almost, a man you would never look twice at. He was average height, average build, had fair skin, that was neither to tan, nor to pale. He had brown hair in a short cut that wouldn't look out of place on a lawyer, or on the criminal he was defending, and he had brown eyes. Not the brown of chocolate or coffee or some esoteric type of wood that only seems to exist for the purpose of over descriptive language in poorly written teen romance novels, no, they were just brown. In fact the only thing that wasn't average about the man was the fact that he was holding a gun, and was about to, along with his partner who currently held me from behind, rape me.

At that point I was panicking, and I'm sure that one of the two men was talking or threatening me or something, but I couldn't hear them. All I could hear was the pounding of my heart in my chest and rushing of blood in my veins. All I could feel was fear, but as the entirely too average man in front of me began to undo his pants; I felt something well up inside of me and overtake the fear. I felt rage, hot rage burning throughout my body until I truly understood the phrase seeing red for the first time. I whether it was due to instinct or choice I don't know, but in my rage I reached for the magic inside me and twisted in the same manner I had been earlier at work when I made that fly perform a suicide dive into some rude assholes mouth. But this time when I sent the magic out at the man in front of me, there wasn't a mouth for him to dive bomb. What there was, was a handgun, and a head for it to be pointed at and a trigger to be pulled. So deep in my rage was I that I didn't even hear the guns retort, but I saw the muzzle flash, I saw the blood and brain spray out of the side of the average man's head and splatter against the alley wall. I felt the grip of the man holding me loosen as he recoiled in shock, and once again seemingly without conscious choice, I spun and stared straight at him. Where the first man had been too average, this man was quite the opposite. He was thin, almost unhealthily so, and appeared all the more thin due to his height, which topped my own by over a foot. His head seemed too long, almost as if it had been stretched out or squeezed between two brick walls. The length of his face had the odd effect of making his face seem stretched out, like a face drawn on a balloon that had been just slightly overinflated. His nose, which sat somewhat off to the left of his face seemed almost absurdly large, sticking out far past the rest of his face, and looking like it had been broken one too many times in the past. His eyes, which were a rather startling shade of blue that would have been quite beautiful in another face, appeared to be staring off in two different directions, likely due to the width separating them, and his mouth, which was hanging open in shock brought on by his friends sudden, and unannounced suicide, seemed almost devoid of teeth, with only two stubborn ones still hanging on to his bottom gum. His blonde hair was long, stringy and looked like it hadn't been washed in month. The whole hideous picture was finished with a scraggly, unkempt attempt at a beard, and a monobrow so thick, it looked like it probably had some manner of tiny bugs living it. All in all it truly made for a face only a mother could love, and she could only love it after a few bottles of cheap vodka.

I still find it odd that I can remember his face with such clarity, despite only looking at it for a moment before my rage once again exploded, and I made that man follow in his recently departed friend's footsteps. A gun raised to the head, a trigger pulled, and once again blood and brain splattered against the alley wall. I don't know how long I stood there before my rage faded, and my adrenaline levels lowered enough to truly understand what I had done. It might have been a few seconds, or it might have been a few hours, but when it did, I decided not to stick around. A quick apparition and I was back home in my apartment safe and sound, and above all terrified. Although it should be said, what terrified me wasn't that I'd almost been raped, all though that certainly did scare me. No, what terrified me was that I had just killed two men, and that I was happy about it. It was with that thought in mind that I slowly faded off into a fitful sleep, gun flashes and blood spatters haunting my dreams. It wouldn't be until the next morning that I realised I had successfully performed the Imperius Curse on a person.

It wasn't until a month after the incident with the two would be rapists, which I will hence forth refer to only as "THE INCIDENT" I finally managed to get up the will to make use of my recently found ability to use the Imperius curse wandlessly and begin to make arrangements to get home to England.

While I was already well on my way to having enough money for a plane ticket, I still needed a passport, and despite what some books will tell you, a person who finds themselves in a strange new world, with no friends or contacts, does not instantly know who to talk to in order to get perfectly forged documents, with minimum fuss, for a reasonable price. That meant that I would need to figure out a way to get one by myself.

The first step was making sure I existed. I don't mean existed in a literal sense, but rather existed in a legal sense. That meant I needed a birth certificate, and a social security number. Thus I began with step one of my brilliant three step plan to get a passport (a plan I would later realise, was neither as brilliant as I first thought, nor in fact, three step), get a birth certificate. Obviously, the best place to get a birth certificate was where most births occur, the hospital. So I on my day off from work I headed to the CAMC Women and Children's Hospital in Charleston, and made my way to the hospital cafeteria. Once there I sat in a corner, under a mild notice-me-not charm (a charm I had practiced and used religiously when not at work ever since "THE INCIDENT") and began to gently use Legilimency (another bit of magic I had practiced extensively since "THE INCIDENT") to scan the surface thoughts of the doctors to find one who had both been working at the hospital for at least twenty years, and secondly, had worked in the maternity ward between June 1986 and December 1987. I had decided on that time frame, due to my current age being just recently turned twenty one I figured it was best to ensure I was legally around the same age. Luck seemed to favour me that night as after only fifteen minutes, I stumbled across a certain Dr. Geoffrey Masters, a fifty-seven year old who had been working at this CAMC hospital for thirty years, and was currently the chief of staff for the Women and Children's hospital. After another fifteen minutes of observing him he stood from his table, and according to what he was thinking began making his way back to his office. Quickly standing and following him, I stopped, ostensibly to ask for directions to the bathroom, but in actuality to quickly use the Imperius curse with a set of quick concise instructions for him to follow.

"Imperio, go to your office, find or call for a copy of the birth certificates that were in use between June 1986 and December 1987. Fill in the following. Name, Darcy Lewis, Date of Birth twelfth of June, 1987. Parents, Jack and Miranda Lewis nèe Granger. Fill all other required information with averages, or leave unfilled. After you have filled it out and signed it meet me at the bus stop at the front of the hospital." And with those simple instructions, the good Dr. Masters was on his way.

As I made my way to the bus stop to wait, I considered the implications of the information I had given him. Instead of giving him my real date of birth, adjusted for the seven year difference, I had instead given the date that I arrived in this time. Admittedly, that date could be thought of as a rebirth of sorts, much like my new name, but still, it was something I defiantly needed to think about. The reasons behind giving my new imaginary parents the same names as by best friend Hermione's parents, even going so far as to use "Granger" as my false mother's maiden name, was rather more obvious. While the time's I had met them were unfortunately few and far between, they had always struck me as something of a parental ideal. Strict and stern when needed, but not cruel like the Dursley's had been. They were loving and supportive, without being overbearing or smothering like the Weasley matriarch had been. Fun and kind, but without ever acting more like the child than the adult, in the way Sirius had been. To me they were everything a good parent should be and little more on top. After meeting them the first time, and hearing stories about them from Hermione, they became what I envisioned my parents behaving like when I imagined them. While they may never realise it, Jack and Miranda Granger, were more like parents to me in the five times I met them, then anyone else had ever been in my life.

After sitting at the bus stop thinking about the instructions I had given the doctor for half an hour or so, I felt a strain of my magic, approaching from behind. Turning I spotted the good doctor, making his way towards me, birth certificate in hand. Grinning, I quickly took it from him and checking it over found everything I expected to be there. The only thing I was missing now was a social security number, but I knew where to go to get that. Quickly I sat the doctor on the bench, removed the Imperius curse, and Obliviating him of everything from the time he left the cafeteria. Now the great thing about the Memory charm, is that after use it gives the caster a period of about a minute in which the charmed person is in a state of only semi consciousness. This time can be used either to run away, or as I used it, to implant a false memory to replace what had been removed through a rather subtle use of Legilimency, and while implanted memory's will never mesh quite the same as real ones and be easily spotted by any half way decent Legillimens, for someone who has no reason to assume that their mind had been tampered with, the haziness of the memory is just mistaken as them having not been paying much attention at the time, so Dr. Masters new memory of falling asleep in his office, before rousing himself for a short walk around the hospital, during which he stopped to chat with a rather attractive brunette at the bus stop, would be readily accepted by him.

So birth certificate in hand, I boarded a bus, and made my way home to begin preparing the next step of my plan.

As it turned out, getting a social security number was much easier than getting a birth certificate. A quick trip to the local office of the Social Security Administration, and an even quicker Imperius curse on the branch manager got an audience in a private office, with a government bureaucrat who was more than happy to help me out. Within an hour I found myself leaving the office, safe in the knowledge that I now existed in government databases and had a completely legal social security number. As for the bureaucrat who had helped, he was left with the rather joyful memory of a romp with another of the callgirls his wife didn't know about, and unknown compulsion to tell his wife all about his infidelity as soon as he got home. Let it never be said that I don't stick up for my fellow woman.

My next stop, as it turned out was my most frustrating, the DMV. The reason for my frustration was simple, there was simply no way I could confound and/or place every single one of the seeming thousands of people in line before me under the Imperius curse in order to get to the head of the line. After waiting for what felt like a few years, but was actually only a few hours, I finally made it to the front of the line, where I met the single rudest, unhelpful, useless sack of crap I had ever had the misfortune of meeting. After arguing with her for another hour I finally gave in and fell back on my Imperius/Obliviate/Legilimency solution and was able to leave, driver's license in hand. As for the help, she would go home to find she had somehow contracted a nasty case of genital herpes. I'll admit a somewhat petty thing to do, but still, not something I have ever regretted.

Having had enough for the day I went home and suffered through another night of fitful, restless sleep. The same kind of sleep I had been suffering since "THE INCIDENT", and would continue to suffer for a long time to come. Even a month after "THE INCIDENT" the interruptions in my sleep were still not due to how close I came to be raped, but still done to the fear I felt from realising that I had enjoyed killing. Fear that I would enjoy killing again. These thoughts that kept me awake at night, and distracted in the day, terrified me more than anything ever had. After all it seemed that these were the types of thoughts that led relatively normal, well adjusted, functioning members of society, to become serial killers, mass murders and rapists. None of which I ever wanted to be. These thoughts and fears would not be something I would be able to move past for another four or more years when I finally met someone who I was able to talk to about "THE INCIDENT" and about my thoughts and feelings on it, and just as a redhead had given me life originally, a redhead would help me continue to live.

AN – Seemed like a good place to end the chapter. Next time Darcy finally learns that she not only left her time, but her world as well.