Chapter Text
“You know what I love about you, Capcicle and Grumpy Cat™?” Tony started without any prompting. After only a beat he answered his own question with a suspicious emphasis, “Your amazing communication skills!”
It was disconcerting and not just because Darcy had only just left her shared apartments with her boys 20 minutes ago. These Avengers and their damn gossip! Little clucking hens, the lot of them!
Unamused and pissed at herself Darcy as much as the man in front of her, she snapped, “What the actual fuck, Tony?”
The look on his face was comical and dramatic. He was playing it up as he did with most things though, so Darcy wasn’t too worried that she’d offended her boss and paycheck.
“Do we have a mind swap situation? Are you actually Grumpy Cat™?” Turning to yell over his shoulder, Tony asked, “Did we have a recent 10-30 Indigo Sierra that no one CC-ed me on?”
“Huh?” came the disembodied voice from Bruce somewhere in the shared Lab™.
Darcy shouldered past him to get to her workstation with Jane. She sat down and went to log on and start the day’s SCIENCE when…
CRASH!
Everyone but Darcy looked to where they thought Bruce was in the Lab™ to make sure the noise hadn’t startled him. He’d popped his head up from behind one of the many 3D Printers and looked more curious than startled, thankfully.
Darcy, on the other hand, was busy dealing with half a lap full of Clint Fucking Barton.
“Beat her here!” Clint said nonsensically and barked out a laugh when Natasha walked into the room. She looked composed if a little out of breath.
Darcy watched the little motes of dust swirl in the Lab™’s florescent lights and hoped they’d mess up Tony’s equipment, contaminate Bruce’s samples and give Clint a sore throat for having been in the airs ducts kicking it all up (Darcy was too scared to wish bad things to the Black Widow, even in her own head). The dust-covered, wriggling man-child in her lap grabbed her attention by literally grabbing her by both sides of the face and forcing eye contact.
“What did they do? Did they hurt you? You can tell me!” Barton, the fuckwit, was trying to be serious, but he was too elated over his ostensible victory in racing Nat to the Lab™. He ended up looking and sounding slightly manic.
“Did everyone forget to take their meds?” Darcy said in a suffering tone. “I know it was tough when I finished my degree and started actually science-ing and so was unable to continue being the house goffer, but didn’t Tony – or Pepper – think to hire a new me?”
Nat approached slowly, stopping when she was just behind Darcy. Leaning over, she used her thumb and pointer finger to pinch some spot on Clint’s right hand. He yelped, let go of Darcy’s face and did a neat tumble off her and the desk. His ass, having been on the keyboard, had smashed random keys in her password input and somehow locked her out. Great.
“Come.” Was the one-word command from Nat.
“Girl talk time,” Tony said with a sage nod of his head.
Darcy didn’t see it happen, but one second Nat was walking the next she was coming out of a grouch. Tony’s explosive, “Fuck!” clueing her to the fact that Nat had thrown something at the man. Darcy saw no blood, so walked on behind Nat out the Lab™ doors.
*
*
*
The walk to the elevator at the end of the hall, the ride up to the Avenger’s common area and kitchen and the walk to said kitchen was uncomfortable, to say the least. Neither spoke. The entire time. At all.
At the kitchen, Nat started making coffee and Darcy just stood there like a dunce. Nat’s back was to her even after she finished prepping the coffee machine, and this was what tipped Darcy to realizing-
“You’re uncomfortable! Look! Even your shoulders are inching up to your shoulders!”
“Yes.” Was the stilted reply.
“Then why did you drag me from work?”
“Barnes.”
As if this made any sense.
“Use your words, please,” Darcy said, the sass coming out in her ire.
“Isn’t that what you and the boys wonder are supposed to do?”
That was a low blow.
“Did James ask you to talk to me or is your friendship with him what urged you to come-”
“They came into the training room where Barton and I were and asked me to talk to you.” The disgust in her tone was heartwarming, truly.
The coffee finished brewing and she crabbed sugar and milk. There was a controlled violence to her movements.
“If they asked you, why was Barton…”
With a great sigh, Natasha Romanov turned to face Darcy. “I should have just let Barton do this. He seemed excited enough and I’m not exactly the best at this kind of thing. I can get anything out of the unwilling, but I doubt Barnes meant for me to interrogate you.”
There was a VERY unhealthy light of hope in her eyes at this last thought that stalled Darcy before the rest filtered through. It didn’t stall for long before Darcy felt heat rise up her neck and into her cheeks. She. Was. Pissed. Righteous fury, pissed.
“But why wouldn’t you be good at this?” Darcy seethed! “You have a vagina. I have a vagina. Of course, we would just TALK IT OUT!”
Put upon, Nat grumbled to herself. “I should have just let Barton handle this. He certainly has a bigger cunt than me.”
“He’s certainly a bigger cunt, period.” Darcy groused.
Darcy couldn’t just stand there. The frustration of having to watch what she could never have that morning was the bale of hay that the agitation of this conversation tipped over. It set her pacing back and forth in the kitchen. Nat sipped her coffee and watched her over the rim of her cup.
“Why did you race to grab me if you weren’t comfortable?!”
“It was a race.”
Darcy turned to leave.
“Wait.”
“What?” she shot back over her shoulder.
“Is everything okay?”
“Peachy.”
“No… Really. Is everything okay? They were going on about how they were missing you the last couple of weeks because Jane’s been working you so hard and something about maybe hurting your feelings over hogging the bed.” Natasha sounded exasperated over having to hear about and retain the useless intel of her teammate’s domestic life.
“I’m going to FUCKING destroy those guys. Why would they focus on all that stupid stuff and blow it up when-” Darcy cut herself off, even stopping in her pacing, before she let slip her real problem.
There was a moment of silence before Nat said, TOO nonchalantly, “When what?”
“You Bi-”
“Careful…”
“Master interrogator…” Darcy griped, but moved into the kitchen properly again to grab a coffee from where the Assassin had yet to move from.
They were quiet while Darcy fixed her coffee.
“Look. If there’s something bothering you, it affects them. And, if it’s affecting them here, it’ll affect them out there.”
Darcy’s heart free-fell at the thought of her boys getting hurt over this when it was just her internal angst of wanting to rail them until they begged her to stop.
“They’re from the 1940’s…” Darcy allowed.
“I have hair.”
“What?”
“Sorry, I thought we were stating the obvious.”
“I just mean that they have feelings about things.”
“I also have toes.”
“FEELINGS ABOUT GENDER, OKAY!”
“I have feelings about gender,” Nat mused.
“I’m leaving.”
Before she could turn, Nat was pinching a nerve in her shoulder and moving anything but her eyes was impossible.
“Those two are surprisingly open with their feelings,” She went on, as if she hadn’t effectively paralyzed the other woman. “And they are both unabashed feminists. Anything you are feeling or worrying about regarding gender would not bother them. Not talking to them, is bothering them.” There was steel in her tone by the end.
It might have been a little understandable why all the Avengers were in her grill because the last time there had been angst James almost died, Steve STABBED a guy, Natasha broken an arm and Thor had knocked out Clint with his hammer. The Team might have had a vested interest in keeping the thruple copacetic.
“I just don’t know how to bring it up,” Darcy said as Nat released the nerve in her shoulder.
“Your cheeks are burning in that particular way that suggests that it’s not just a gender thing… it’s also a sex thing.” Nat said while eyeing her closely.
Spluttering, Darcy could only manage to get out, “W-what? N-no! What!?” Her coffee sloshed in her cup as she gesticulated her articulate renunciation.
“Porn is too obvious, but Barnes would appreciate it.”
Darcy nearly dropped her cup at this. “What?” she said, effectively segued from her denial. She put her cup down and faced Nat fully.
“If it’s something done in a porno,” Natasha said clearly, as she moved her coffee to one hand and leaned against the counter. “You could watch it together. Or you could have it on in the background for them to be inspired by or at least open up the conversation.” She said this as if it was a reasonable thing to do, that one would just throw on porn like no big deal and Darcy said as much.
“You think we just casually have porn on in the apartment?”
Nat did laugh at this, “No, you nonce. I mean that you put it on when you are setting the mood-”
Putting her life at risk, Darcy interrupted, “We don’t set the mood. One of the three of us is usually horny and finding one of the other two to gang up on the third isn’t very hard…”
“If not porn,” Nat said through what would have been gritted teeth from anyone else, “Then a soft-core porn from HBO or Showtime. Something with some story that makes it acceptable. It’s the same idea. Get them to see it and get interested and maybe offer it up as something to try. You can always talk about it in a ‘what did you think about that’ kind of way if they don’t offer it up.” She said this last slowly, as if to a particularly slow child.
In a very small voice, Darcy dared to say, “I don’t think this has ever been done on tv…”
“Oh!” Nat said, lips going round in little o at the realization of what Darcy wanted. “You want to peg them?”
“SHHHHHHH!”
Darcy leant her entire body in close to Nat, shushing her and said, sotto voce, “Please! You don’t understand. They have all these ideas about what I mean to them. I’m Their Girl™ and doll and petal.”
“You do know they already like it in the-”
“NAT!”
“How is this not obvious to you? The movie you need stars your celebrity crush.” Nat looked at her pointedly.
“OMG! You’re right!” Darcy felt hope bloom in her chest. There was a hope this might work, and she could get want she wanted and maybe even have it be their idea! “They were celebrating international women’s day and she…”
Darcy wasn’t even paying attention now as she turned and walked out of the kitchen. Looking back, she liked to imagine she was walking towards her destiny. Nat would look back and think that she lived with idiots.