Author's Notes – Well the Avengers know, so now Darcy has to make a phone call!
Darcy paced her room considering the wedding. She wanted simple and intimate, so she could toss a lot of the complicated frou-frou out the window, but she did want her family there. That had meant talking to SHIELD and getting them to start the paperwork process. She suppressed a giggle as she remembered that meeting. Fury twitched over the potential security risks while Maria carefully suppressed her amusement and agreed to have one of the baby agents get things in order.
Now she had a bigger job to tackle. It was time for her to call home. She usually spoke with her parents every couple of weeks as well as anyone else at the house, but there would be hell to pay if she waited any longer to give her this kind of news. With a quick tap of fingers she dialed the phone and waited for someone to answer.
"Hello?"
"Hey, Mam!"
"Darcy!" Her mother's voice warmed immediately. "How are you, Baby Girl? Wasn't expecting to hear from you until next week sometime."
"Something's happened," Darcy replied, her own voice bright and cheerful. "I thought it would be a better idea to call you right away. I didn't want to get a lecture about sharing."
"I haven't lectured you on something like that since you were a little thing," Maire Lewis scolded. "Now, what's so important it can't wait until your usual call?"
"Do you remember me telling you about Phil?"
"Not going senile yet," Maire pointed out. "Of course I remember! You've only talked about him every other call. The first time you mentioned him I got to listen to a twenty minute rant on the man – something about idiot men, stolen iPods, and stupid risks with prototype weapons. I still think the iPod was him pulling your pigtails though."
"I think you were right," Darcy admitted.
Her mother's rich laughter spilled over. "Now there's a phrase I would have paid good money to hear once upon a time ago. So…tell Mama all about it. How did you figure it out?"
"He proposed." Silence fell so abruptly Darcy checked her phone to make sure she still had a signal. "Mam? Ma?"
"Are you telling me this fellow just up and proposed out of a clear sky one day?" Her mother's voice could not seem to decide which emotion to settle on. The one question moved from disbelief to suspicion to surprise.
"Um…" Darcy bit her lip. "Well, it wasn't really out of nowhere."
Maire cleared her throat. "Have you been keeping secrets from me, Baby Girl?"
"Maybe?" Oh, if only she knew. Never mind the Avengers, SHIELD, living in Stark mansion – this was no time to discuss how long she'd been engaged. If her mother found out she went longer than a week without telling her? Oh boy.
"I'm going to be having a talk with you about that one of these days," her mother warned. She could hear something tapping on the other end of the line and a picture formed in her mind. Her mother always sat at the kitchen table to talk on the phone. When she needed to gather her thoughts, one finger would tap rapidly on the scarred, wooden surface. "I know you've said there are secrets with your work, and how you ended up in some kind of security I will never know, but-"
"We're co-workers," Darcy interrupted.
"Ah." Now she could see her mother nodding slowly as she took in the information. A sudden fierce longing hit Darcy – she missed her family. Maire sighed. "We've not pushed. As long as they're good secrets you're keeping, then we'll honor your wishes, but I would have liked to have met the fellow before it reached this point. Your Da and your uncles will want to meet him too, you know."
Darcy took a breath. "I know, Mam, and I'm sorry about that. We're usually pretty busy and our schedules don't always mash so well…at least not when it comes to time off." Her mind raced for a moment as she considered what she should mention to start laying some groundwork. A picture of Phil popped up in her mind's eye. "He's older than I am," she told her mother. "Old enough people talk, but not old enough to be creepy."
"People's tongues will wag no matter what," her mother sniffed. "Is he old enough to be your grandfather?"
"No!"
"Then it's not enough to be creepy," Maire pronounced. "He older than your Da?"
"No, though that's a little closer."
"As long as he's right for you, that's all right." The tapping noise picked up again. "You're too much the 'little mother' to put up with the younger fellows anyway. When is the wedding?"
Darcy repressed a wince even though her mother wasn't there to see her. "May."
"This May?"
"Yes, Mam."
A long moment of silence passed by before her mother spoke again. "Is there something else you need to tell me?" Oh, she could almost see the demanding eyebrow arching over snapping green eyes.
"I'm not pregnant," she blurted out.
She heard a quick huff of air and then Maire asked, "So why the rush? May's only a few months away."
"Because Phil's being silly about 'right' times and I don't plan on a year-long engagement," she replied in a firm, steady voice.
"Got your mind made up, don't you?" The rhetorical question held a light concern, but even more pride. "When will we meet him?"
Darcy had been thinking about that. She did not want Phil's first meeting with her parents in the city. While she adored each and every one of their 'charges', she wasn't sure it would be a good idea to toss her family into the deep end and hope the figured out which was up. Not that she was sure which 'family' would be the most confused. Her Avenger family might be the heroes of the age, but the Lewis' came from unflappable Irish daredevil stock. If there was a mountain to climb, an ocean to dive, a desert to cross, or sky to fly, someone in her family had done it.
Come to think of it…that was probably why she handled the Avengers so well.
"Well?"
Her mother's question drew her attention once more. "I'm going to see what I can do about that," she promised. "Hopefully things will settle for a couple of days and we can fly out for a quick visit." Biting her bottom lip, she continued hesitantly, "And it will have to be a short one, Mam. The job's got a lot of perks, but…"
"With the good comes the bad," Maire sighed. "Long as you give me a couple of days' notice, I'll have the family here and ready. We'll do a Lewis baptism of fire." Another rolling laugh sounded down the line. "If he can handle that, then he'll have a good chance of handling you."
"Oh, he'll manage," Darcy told her confidently. "Phil's a rock."
"Really, now? That sounds promising."
"He's a lot like Uncle Carrig," she continued, her mind considering the solid and levelheaded man the whole family turned to during troubled times.
"I like him already," Maire replied. "If it goes more than skin deep, then I'll be the happiest mother-in-law he'll ever meet. That's exactly the sort of man you need, Baby Girl. Good thing, too, since he's the first boy you've brought home since you were fifteen." She paused. "I don't want to be pushy, but have you considered your dress as yet?"
"What's to consider?" Darcy asked. "You promised me Nana Grace's dress and that's the one I still want." She could still picture the dress with its beautiful overlay of hand-embroidered Irish lace. Every bride in the family had worn the dress since 1912, even some of those marrying into the clan. "I want to be married in that dress and your brooch."
"And a beautiful bride you will be, too," her mother told her softly. "I'll warn your father, shall I? Then I can fetch out the dress and let it air. We can do a fitting when you visit."
"It'll fit." Even Darcy could hear the hopeful anxiety in her voice.
"This is good home-made lace we're talking about," came the swift encouragement. "It was made to be adjusted for generations, not like that flimsy store-bought stuff."
"Thanks, Mam."
"Anytime, sweetheart. Now, tell me more about this fellow and what else you've decided for your wedding."
Darcy spent over an hour talking to her mother before she hung up the phone. Now, more than ever, the wedding felt real to her. It was time to really marshal her allies and advantages. Tomorrow she would call Pepper, Natasha, and Maria and invite them to lunch. She needed a plan and those three could strategize like nobody else except maybe Phil, and she'd turned over the majority of hero-herding to him until the wedding.
The wedding…a burst of laughter spilled over and out of her as she thought about it.
It had the potential to be one wild day - she and Phil getting married; the Avengers, SHIELD, Asgardians, and the Lewis clan together in one party!
Hopefully they left the city standing…