Darcy floats back into consciousness with that feeling of complete and utter peace; the kind you wake up with from knowing that because you haven't moved an inch that you were dead tired and your body needed that sleep. She has a death grip on the pillow pressed to her chest. Her chin is tucked up on its corner, the edge of it is squeezed between her knees and there's an odd but comforting heat at her back, like if she's slept with her heating pad. But the heat comes with boa constrictor arms that are wound under her head and around her torso keeping her locked tightly against the chest of someone very, very warm.

She blinks herself into full alertness and silently begins to panic because fuck if she can remember anything from the past few days, except that she had turned into a zombie that feasted on caffeine and guarrana to stay alive. The only thing visible in her blurry line of vision is a nightstand, that only contains a lamp and a dusty looking pair of dog tags with a ring nestled between them.

Darcy's heart is now pounding and she's sure that it's going to wake up her bed partner, and now that she can fucking remember that she pathetically crawled into Clint's room last night (with a little help from JARVIS) and fucking waited for him to get home from that mission she's über embarrassed. Not just blushing and apologizing profusely, but Earth-please-swallow-me-whole embarrassed. So when he inhales deeply, and squeezes her just a little bit tighter she thinks she's going to have a heart attack. But he releases her and rolls away, and now she's frozen in place and shuts her eyes and just keeps breathing, because soon the bed is dipping and she can hear him pad across the room to the bathroom and the door quietly swinging to the door jam. She doesn't waste a second, but drops the pillow and scurries from the room, bumping her shins on more than one thing on her way out of the door and back into her own apartment, before she can let go of that breath that she holding so violently.

Jane is in her kitchen, Pop-Tarts at hand and half a pot of coffee already gone, reading over what is obviously new information from the latest project that she and Dr. Banner are working on together, and she looks up when Darcy enters with a line of worry still clearly indented in her forehead.

"Oh good, I was a little worried when you weren't here this morning, but you look like you've actually slept," Jane says before retrieving a fresh mug from the clean dishes rack next to the sink and setting it next to the pot for Darcy to build herself a complicated caffeinated beverage, usually involving flavor shots and baking spices.

"Yeah," Darcy's voice croaks, "I guess I got a few hours," she stumbles over to the couch where her glasses are buried under a pillow and between the cushions, faintly hearing an off-beat of white noise, most likely from the air conditioner.

"Where did you end up going? And what time did you leave? I never heard you get up," Jane says, easily slipping into the older sister-mother hen role that she had recently become quite fond of.

Darcy shrugs and moves to pour her coffee, "next door," she says quietly as she stirs hazelnut creamer and cocoa powder into her cup.

Jane looks at her strangely from beside her research, "why would you... Oh," her eyes widen at the tee shirt that Darcy had surreptitiously changed into last night. "you aren't sleeping with Barton, are you?"

Darcy winces and takes a sip of her bitter coffee, "there is, we've never," she sighs. "There was spooning, that was the first time and we've NEVER done it," but the offer is still standing, Darcy thinks but neglects to add.

Jane's eyes remain wide, and for the first time since arriving, she notices the soothing white background noise was in fact the shower, which had just stopped. She looks befuddled at Jane who is now looking away and blushing scarlet. Fifteen seconds later Thor steps out of Darcy's bedroom wrapped in a nearly-too-small blue towel with a wide grin on his face, "Lady Darcy! My dearest Jane was concerned at your disappearance last evening and I'm sure is glad to see your safe return!" Because Thor's happy volume was at a 22, and Darcy had only begun to drink her first cup of Joe.

Her eyes move from Thor's body to Jane with one raised eyebrow, "tell me that you two did not hump like bunnies on my bed," she flinches.

Jane looks guiltily toward the couch.

Darcy shudders, "oh, just on my new blanket then."

"Friend Darcy, why are you wearing the sparring shirt of my Shield-Brother Clint?" because Thor would know whose shirt she is wearing, but then again, Cap wears vintage and Tony and Bruce can't be paid to wear them. "Is he courting you?" he asks in an excited tone, "may I get to perform the Midgardian custom of 'protective older sibling', as my Jane says it is called?"

"No!" Jane shouts at the same time that Darcy sputters her coffee and mumbles "It's complicated."

Thor nods sagely to Darcy and Jane and says, "yes, I have heard of that saying before, you are not courting, but you are sharing a bed then?"

Darcy blanches and sets down her mug quickly, sloshing some of the contents over the side and onto the counter.

"Ok, Thor, sweetie, let's get you into some clothes and we'll go get some breakfast out. At a diner, where none of the team will be," Jane says while ushering Thor back into Darcy's bedroom with an apologetic look over her shoulder to her friend.

Thor ended up apologizing later that evening, commenting that while he meant no offense, that from what he had gathered from Midgardian culture, the phrase 'It's complicated' typically involved sex without any sort of formal relationship or with multiple partners where feelings were often unresolved or unknown amongst the participants.

He continued on to observe that while they may not be metaphorically sleeping together, that it was obvious to everyone that they held some desire and care for one and other, regardless of what may or may not have been said between them. Barton's obvious distress near the end of the mission when he received an encoded text from HQ, had sent him in a tizzy, where he was unreachable for at least an hour of their final planning, and was back and ready for action with a brutal vengeance that seemed to concern most of the team. It had taken Tony twenty minutes to hack into the SHIELD database and locate the encrypted message (all because JARVIS refused to be of assistance on this one) and quietly played telephone among the rest of the team until Natasha sent him a flat glare that stopped all gossip. The only thing that Thor had heard on the flight was that the message was pertaining to Darcy, but none of the details (which he had later received from Jane) were known to him. In the end he apologized once more, in a volume that Darcy could accept and appreciate, and went off to find Jane. This left Darcy standing in her apartment with Clint's shirt in her hand and not a fucking clue what to do with it.

Darcy knocks quietly on the door before her. She isn't sure which is worse, having to talk about this situation or actually being part of it. But she stands there, tries not to fidget and dance around on her feet, or pull at the loose thread from the hem of the shirt that is balled between her hands. The door opens with a quiet click, and swings to reveal Barton before her, looking gruff, like he has still been sleeping since she left earlier that morning and more than a little annoyed to see her there. She dances a little more, tries to find the right thing to say, and Clint, the asshole that he is, stands there and stares expectantly.

"Here's your shirt back, thanks for letting me borrow-" he waves his hand and cuts her off before she can even finish her sentence.

"It was a gift," he says flatly.

Well so much for that.

"Oh," she nods once and fists the shirt into a tighter ball, which makes her knuckles hurt. She turns on her heel and shuffles slowly back to her room, she doesn't hear the door close next door as she shuts her own and leans against it. "Sofuckingstupid," she breathes out in frustration and frowns, disliking the tingly feeling in her jaw and the flipping of her intestines in that unpleasant upchuck sort of manner. Regardless she has to make it back to the office in the morning, and she is sure that JARVIS can attest to her sleeping, if only just making those ten hours required by Coulson, so she strips off the sweater and bra, shrugs back on the now wrinkled tee that doesn't smell quite as much like Clint as it did the night before, and peels the leggings that she assumed would work for a day of bumming it. They are stripped half-way down, over her knees when the unmistakable click of her door opening shocks her. She freezes and dares to peek around the side of her leg to see Clint standing stock still in her doorway.

"Uh, hi?" she asks as she quickly stands and turns, doing that funny dance of trying to toe-off the rest of her leggings.

"Don't mind me," Clint grins wolfishly.

Ah, this she is familiar with. So she rolls her eyes and collects her discarded clothes from the floor, careful not to bend over and wave her ass in the air once again, like she had accidently been doing when he walked through her door, uninvited. Moving back to her bedroom she deposits her laundry in the hamper and looks over her shoulder to see him standing just inside of the door. "Which side do you want?" he asks before she can even fathom what he is thinking about doing.

"Uh," she articulates, and points to the side she is standing at, and crawls under the messy covers, as he does the same on the other side. The new pillows are a nice addition.

"Heads up, I usually sprawl," Darcy says as he tugs her by her hips back to his.

He chuckles darkly in her ear, "I know, and you snore too, remember?"

She rolls her eyes, "I do not snore."

"Mmhm, where's that awesome blanket?"

"You would think it's awesome, it's in the hamper."

"I happen to have one just like it, why's it in there and not over here?"

"Jane and Thor christened it and my couch last night."

He makes a noise of disapproval and runs his nose up her neck, "try and sleep."

"You try and sleep," she bites back, trying for mean, but yawns instead, tumbling back off of the edge into dreamlessness.

It doesn't end up being every night, because SHIELD does still send him away on side missions, and the Avengers are, well, the Avengers. And those nights Darcy hunkers down with a full pillow, fleece blanket and a borrowed shirt, usually with some sort of distractingly favorite movie, and she waits.

But she tries; she does try and sleep when he's not there. She doesn't let herself get behind on paperwork, and almost always does what Coulson requests (almost always), and if Clint happens to be gone for a week and Darcy spends the night chained to a desk it usually only takes one disapproving look from Coulson before she knows that he'll run and tattle on her, so she'll take the afternoon off and wait it out with Jane in the labs, or in her apartment, or next door in his. But he usually ends up home not too soon after that, and Darcy thinks that maybe Coulson does give him a heads up, or pulls him out of the field, because a sleep deprived personal assistant is not a helpful one. Because maybe keeping Barton out of all of the relatively dangerous danger is one way to keep the best assistant/secretary/barista/lab tech that SHIELD's ever had the good luck of acquiring, sane. Or at least, that's how Darcy tends to rationalize it.

It only takes her about three months of them sleeping in the same bed, to realize that this is a regular sleeping routine. Something that she hasn't had in a very long time. And the next time that she sees Clint, sitting in her kitchen, drinking out of his favorite mug she tells him. "So, you know, thanks," she concludes and he looks at her kind of funnily. They've been back and forth between their two apartments so many times that his favorite mug sits beside hers, her teapot became their teapot, she has her own drawer for her panties and bras, and sometimes she borrows his socks along with his tee shirts and how the fuck did this all happen to her.

Clint is still looking at her amused and he sets down his mug, "Are you particularly attached to that wall?" he nods over her shoulder to the wall behind her sofa.

She glances at it and looks back at him, now wearing his expression from earlier, "it's a wall."

"Cool."

When she walks back in at 5:35 the wall is fucking gone.