I wrote this at 1am and am uploading at 1:30am let me know if anything is crazy. I couldn't let this go an entire year without updating. I've got another one chapter partially written too. Last chapter was Spies by Coldplay. I may work in the fall of SHIELD. A previous chapter mentions that Darcy was an agent, but in this one she's working for the Avengers. Timeline goes - TTDW - Darcy starts training, becomes an agent - SHIELD falls, she follows Jane to the Avengers - her talent for social media starts being used for Avengers PR.
Sometimes it seemed like the world forgot that Tony Stark was Iron Man. Everyone remembered Iron Man coming out of the desert, but no one remembered Tony Stark going in. Today's headlines were an unwelcome reminder of that.
The annual Avenger's Charity Ball had been Friday night. Saturday's papers were filled with articles criticizing the theme colors – red and gold – and that Tony had worn the Iron Man suit for the first dance, with Pepper clad in metallic red. Reporters called it a blatant display of narcissism. They speculated on Tony's ego tearing the team apart. Iron Man, they said, had gone overboard. The Daily Mail and other papers questioned when Tony Stark had earned the right to "throw a celebration of himself."
When the Avengers PR team had been called on for comment, Darcy had volunteered to face the press. She didn't trust her baby interns with this. They were good at uploading a steady stream of cute Avengers photos to social media, not dealing with the bloodthirsty media. Pepper probably wanted to deal with this herself, but Darcy had kept it from coming to the CEO's attention all morning, trying to give the woman at least a short respite from the stress of running Stark Industries and dealing with the team of superheroes.
Now she faced the reporters huddled outside of the tower. Briefly, Darcy wondered if the charity event had been scheduled for January in hopes that the weather would discourage paparazzi from lingering outside it. She was snapped out of her thoughts when a reporter asked "when did Stark earn the right to place himself on such a pedestal?"
Darcy considered asking the reporter if he would say the same thing about Steve, but decided that would only stir up more rumors that the team was falling apart.
"You never know the top til you get too low," she said, pausing before her next statement. "We all know that Iron Man came out of the desert. The suit wasn't created by an engineer working in a comfortable lab. Iron Man came out of the desert, but Tony Stark went in."