Current mood:	pleased
Entry tags:	fic:fandom:avengers, fic:m/f

Oh hey look, reveals happened on Rarepair fics! Man, this was a really difficult one to write, mostly because I have a hard time getting a grasp on either of these characters, and Darcy especially can just become a caricature so easily. But if nothing else, I really needed to finish it for the sake of her Twitter username alone, because I have to say, that was fucking genius on my part.

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Avengers, PG, Darcy/Loki. With some implied Jane/Thor/Tony/Pepper, because of course there is.



Really, if you were gonna blame anyone for this, it should be Jane, since she was the one who suggested they give Darcy babysitting duty in the first place. Oh, she had a really great intro to the whole thing, because nine times out of ten when Jane thought she was being smooth it was just funny but apparently this was the tenth time because she was good. Plus she had a huge bottle of tequila that Darcy was pretty sure cost about as much as a few months' rent on her studio (admittedly, that was a low bar, but still). It was Tony's, of course, and it should've been a warning sign right there that he'd agreed to part with booze, because Jane said she hadn't even had to steal it. And then it was all blah blah blah think what an opportunity you have here, what would your adviser say if you passed up the chance to interview the disowned prince of an alien world, and Thor can't do it because it breaks his heart and/or he breaks the building, and the rest of the Avengers have other work to do, and really, someone had to do it.

"You could rationalize asking me to do pretty much anything that way!" Darcy attempted, struggling bravely against the influence of the margaritas. Extra emphasis on the brave, because it was February in New York, and thus really gross out, with sleet and everything, and the margaritas were basically summer in a glass.

"Darcy, logic is fundamental to the scientific method, don't try to Humanities Degree me into thinking I've committed a fallacy when, if anything, you're the one pulling out the slippery slope argument. Yeah, I could use that as rationalization to ask you to do anything you're qualified for."

"How the heck am I qualified to baby-sit a frickin' chaos god? What about one of the SHIELD cops? Isn't that kind of what they're here for?"

That's about how most of her conversations with Jane went, so in the interest of cutting a long story short, apparently it wasn't what they were here for. She'd also tried to talk Tony into lending her one of his security guys, but they came to an impasse, which is a fancy word for making it about twelve seconds before he asked what she'd give him in return, and since he had all the money in the world and she had all the student loans in the world, and a hard drive containing pirated copies of several different countries' versions of Top Model, that was about as far as it went.

He hadn't even tried to get her to sleep with him. If she didn't know that he knew that Jane and Thor would team up to kill him in his sleep for it, she might've been a little insulted, in kind of a twisted way.
 
 
 
 
Once they'd established that she wasn't going to pay attention to him, either by putting on her iPod and just watching to see which of her albums his words would sync up with the best, or by just straight-up ignoring him (she'd gotten several papers drafted by learning the art of selectively tuning out Jane and Erik), things were pretty okay. In fact, the main problem was, well...it was boring as crap. So it was surprising that it was after he'd basically ranted himself out—she thought maybe he was just tricking her, on account of how, you know, it was Loki, but no, he'd actually just given up after awhile and now didn't treat her any differently from Anonymous Guard #4—that she realized she'd listened to everything on her iPod at least three times and she was ready to smash it at the thought of listening to her "Darcy's Favorites OF ALL TIME" playlist once more.

Podcasts helped a little, but it was amazing how quickly you could go through the free selections of their back catalogs, and see previous statements re: all the student loans in the world, so more were out.

Reading was supposed to be out, but no one said anything—despite the approximately five billion cameras she could see, and who knew how many more she couldn't—when she pulled out a magazine. When she finally did just give up the pretense and start bringing books, she kept it light, ostensibly because that way she wouldn't be as hard to pull out of said book if something happened, but mostly because, as previously mentioned, grad school, and she'd had enough hard reading to last her at least the next decade or so.

And one thing led to another and somehow this was when she ended up giving in and talking to Loki, which yes, she'd been explicitly warned not to do, but really, all he did was ask her about her freaking romance novel. It's not like he was going to turn the world upside-down with Liz Carlyle.

Mostly her reluctance was because she figured he'd get snotty about it, because a) everyone got snotty about romance novels and b) Loki got snotty about everything, except when he was getting homi- and/or genocidal, and sometimes then, too. It was a logical assumption, really. But instead he just got super-intrigued.

And it wasn't like she didn't look for alternatives; she asked the guard if she could just give Loki the book and he gave her this death glare like he'd personally seen her hide a pack of cigarettes and a nail file inside of it while he watched. When she kept asking, because she had nothing better to do and a few weeks of staring at Loki got you used to death glares, he said that anything given to prisoners had to be approved by Fury. Which, screw that.

But that basically left her with what she ended up doing, namely using the speaker system to read the books to him herself. It actually wasn't as embarrassing as you might think, even when they got to the sexy parts.

"You're blushing," he said, the first time that happened, and he said it in this low, rough voice, and he was smirking, and you'd think that would do it. Better women than Darcy had probably melted under less. But they didn't have the memory of Loki getting his ass kicked by everyone they saw on a regular basis to comfort them, so she entertained herself with those images instead of the sexy ones, which might be a little weird, but thanks to Twilight fanfiction that was in these days, so whatever. And that only lasted until she hit the first weird euphemism, which, even though they weren't as plentiful as they might've been back in the day, still showed up enough to make things fun. Then she just started giggling, and Loki stopped commenting on the state of blood flow to her face because they were too busy making snide comments about the sex scenes.
 
 
 
 
So from there, a Twitter account was the logical next step, because she and Loki's commentary was, if she did say so herself, pretty hilarious, and after that, it wasn't long before ThorbbingMember was doing guest reviews on Smart Bitches Trashy Books. And SHIELD was, shockingly, okay with this, or at least with her continued visits to Loki even though people increasingly agreed that yes, there probably were more qualified persons for the job. But Thor was really happy all the time, and this time it wasn't because he'd spent another morning playing with Pepper in her and Tony's penthouse and the two of them had had way too much fun with the espresso machine, it was because his brother was maybe not lost to humanity or Asgardity or whatever after all.

But let's face it, at this point in her career, that was all depressingly normal. It was somewhere around the third month of Lokisitting duty was when everything really got weird.

That first time, she blamed the dream on the fact that she'd had lasagna for dinner. She'd eaten late, and they said you got weird dreams if you ate cheese right before bed, and the whole reason she loved this diner's lasagna was all the cheese that oozed out of it. The point was, Darcy fell asleep on the couch with the TV on and instead of dreaming about stealing her neighbor's cat with Stephen Colbert, like she usually did when that happened, she was wearing one of those fancy Jane Austen-movie dresses, and there was her protesting halfheartedly as a gentleman's fingers slid her gloves down her arms and brushed along the bare skin and when she finally looked up to kiss him the fact that he was wearing some kind of fancy Jane Austen-movie coat and his hair wasn't all greasy still didn't hide the fact that it was freaking Loki she was making out with.

Never mind that it was Loki and that was just weird, it still progressed from there about the way it always did in books.

The worst part was probably when she woke up, though, because she was gasping, and she totally had to pee, but once that was over with she realized she was feeling like one of those lamps with the adjustable brightness in the maximum setting. Which is to say, about as turned on as it was possible to get.

"Oh, for God's sake," she said to herself in the mirror. She splashed water on her face, and stared at herself a little more, full of what would've been disgust if she weren't so sleepy and also turned on. Then she went back to bed and once she was there, she grabbed her vibrator from its drawer in the bedside table.

She had to be up way too early to spend much time tossing and turning and being morally conflicted.
 
 
 
 
But really, when you thought about it, it wasn't all that weird that it would've happened. She told herself this the next morning, while she was on her way back to Loki's cell and only hating the lighting in the elevator a little more than usual. Anyway, if this were really a romance novel, she would've gotten all blushy and avoided him extra hard, and here she was, right? Which was only partly due to the fact that Thor and Jane, arriving at the same time as she did, had said hi, and then Thor had hung back and grabbed her and told her, his eyes all big and blue and, really weird for him, sad—she was about 80% certain they literally glowed sometimes, when he was really turning the charm on, someone should totally look into that—how grateful he was to her, because he hadn't seen Loki this happy, this close to his old self, since before either of them first came to Midgard. And even if she were going to be a romance novel character about it, which she wasn't, because see above re: this not being a romance novel, what kind of d-bag could've said no to the Golden Retriever Viking Prince?

Besides, she was pretty sure they were just another few weeks away from a book deal. Duty called, and by duty, she meant her student loans.

It got a little trickier when it became apparent that the dreams were going to be a regular thing, though. And harder to wake herself up from, but that was probably just because, well, she really hadn't been laid in awhile. Plus, the truth was...they were kinda hot. She was just saying, dream!Loki, be he cowboy or business tycoon or NASCAR driver, invariably knew his way around her parts. Really, it was kind of convenient, if you thought about it. This way she didn't have to deal with all the hassle of actually going out to bars and trying to pick dudes up, especially the kinds of dudes she always seemed to meet at bars.

So no, she never really thought that it was weird, at all, at least no weirder than anything else in her life, which, she'd like to remind everyone, was a life where job duties included keeping an alien/demi-god company in his cell at Avengers Tower. So no, she did not immediately go all woo-woo crystals and patchouli over her dreams; she assumed the normal, logical thing, the thing that Dr. Science Q. Foster would totally argue, which was that they were just dreams, brought on by the fact that she spent most of the aforementioned alien/demi-god visiting time making fun of romance novels, and also that she hadn't been laid in awhile!

No, the thought that she was dealing with someone who'd worked mind control several times on the record and who knew how many times off of it didn't occur to her. Maybe that's why they paid Jane the big grant bucks and she was the minimum-wage alien babysitter, did anyone ever think of that?
 
 
 
 
The point is, yeah, of course it all went horribly wrong, as apparently everyone except her had seen coming, not that, she thought it was worth pointing out, anyone had done anything to stop it, even though apparently they all saw it coming. Yes, finally, there was the night when her phone kept going off. Like any normal person, she threw it against the wall because she was freaking tired. And when someone finally told her to wake up, she opened her eyes and saw Loki smirking down at her, in the most Loki-ish manner she'd seen him do yet, and they'd been spending a lot of time together the past seven months or so...oh, fuck, was it really that long? Well, maybe...

...maybe she was totally fucked.

"I just wanted to say thank you," he said, and right about now, if this were pretty much any book in the world, not just a romance novel, Darcy would be wondering if this were actually a dream. But it wasn't, because dreams felt totally different from reality, although granted, not when you were having them, and her Loki dreams especially, so maybe—no, no way, this was definitely real, not least because if it were a dream this would've made sense, because dreams always make sense when they're happening. You don't stand there and gape and become super-conscious of the fact that you're in your underwear, and okay, maybe this is the guy (slash demi-god slash alien worshiped as a god centuries before you were born) you've been reading and mocking sex scenes with for the past seven months (?????!!!!!!!!!!!!???!?!?!) but you've always been fully clothed when you did that, and also there was one (1) visible barrier and probably several (#?) ones you couldn't see between you.

Her phone went off again right then, and somehow it was in his hand, and he held it up so she could see JANE on the screen. "Oh, it looks like she's called you a few times already," he commented, as Darcy continued to gape at him in a totally un-dream-like way. If this weren't Manhattan, crickets would be chirping after he talked, but she supposed the sirens—boy there were a lot of sirens tonight, actually, weren't there? Darcy wondered why that could possibly be—accomplished much the same thing. "Probably wanted to warn you about me."

And still, Darcy didn't say or do much of anything, because she was, you know, scared stiff. Finally, though, after she got sick of him standing there all smirkily, she managed "So, what, are you just here to gloat, or should I be trying to find something hostage-appropriate, or what?"

They went on like that for another ten minutes or so, according to her phone, which was smugly displaying that Jane, and SHIELD, and at one point Iron Man, were the source of her eight missed calls. She didn't quite grasp all of it, on account of there was friggin' magic involved, but apparently all the tweeting had worked some kind of influence spell, blah blah magic blah, and long story short he had totally broken out of his un-break-out-able SHIELD prison with the help of all those thousands of ThorbbingMember's followers.

"Is that why I've been having the dreams?" she asked, not sure whether she was relieved that she wasn't secretly in love with him or disappointed and also super creeped out by the fact that it hadn't been legit attraction.

He frowned at her. "What dreams?"

She waited a second for him to smirk again and tell her he was fucking with her on that, too, because, again, it was Loki she was dealing with here. But not too long, because she'd been thinking about it ever since he made himself comfortable by sitting down on the edge of her bed, close enough for her to reach, and it was now or never. Darcy kissed him. Like, hard, as hard as she could. She was giving it her all, here, one of her hands went to his face and he started kissing her back, which was, well...honestly, it was awesome. His mouth even opened a little, and then a lot, and he leaned against her and reached for her and guided her back against the headboard, which was even better.

He was warmer than she expected, for someone who was actually something called a Frost Giant. Warm, and his skin was ridiculously smooth. Her right hand, the one that wasn't on his face, drifted there, too, for a second, until she remembered why she'd kept it free in the first place, which took longer than anyone would ever get her to admit.

With him being such a good kisser, it was almost bittersweet when she brought the lamp down on his head.
 
 
 
 
"...so really," she said, "this wasn't nearly as weird as you're making it out to be."

"No," Jane said. "It's still really weird."

"Well," Tony said, and then Jane looked at him, and Thor looked at him, and he shut up. Really, if she didn't know that Jane was probably her best bet for getting someone here on her side quickly she'd totally have pointed out that whatever weird polyamorous thing was apparently going on with those three and Pepper was at least as weird, because it was.

"It's not that weird," Natasha said. Darcy also semi-suspected she might have seen Natasha fight a smile there for a second, even though at the moment she was all Serious Spy.

There was a little more bickering among the rest of the Avengers, as usually happened whenever anything happened ever, and Fury continued to just glower at her, but since he was generally glowering at everyone anyway, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, right? Finally, she just said "Uh, are we done here, or did you have anything else you needed?"

Fury glowered at her in standard Furious form for another second or two, except this time it was more of a thoughtful glower, and finally he said "We're done, Miss Lewis. For the time being." Which sort of made her want to ask one of those many capable people present to just kill her. Except for Cap, who would probably cry like someone had told him there would be no more puppies or apple pie ever. But Clint might do it, or maybe she could piss Bruce off enough...

"Come on," Jane said, picking up Darcy's bag, which meant she was feeling guilty, probably about putting Darcy up to this in the first place, as well she might. "Girls' night. You and me and Natasha. We'll see if Pepper's willing to slum it for the night with us."

"Ms. Potts can totally host," Tony offered, "and I think we've got a few extra bathrobes lying around, if you girls really want to get comfortable—"

No one really paid him much attention, except for Thor, who cuffed him upside the head, and started talking about how they must find their own entertainment for the evening, and okay, seriously, who was anyone in this room to find Darcy's love life weird, again?

Yeah, that's what she thought.
 
 
 
 
And then, two weeks later, Jane cornered her again.

"Look," she said, "Thor is pretty convinced you were actually making progress there."

Darcy snorted, but it wasn't as pronounced as it could've been, because Thor had been Sad Puppy-Dog-Facing around the Tower for awhile now, the way he usually looked in the intervals between trying to talk to Loki and going off to hit things until he stopped being sad.

"And," Jane said, "you know, there might be other ways to turn this into a book deal. Pepper totally knows a bunch of people all over publishing." The card she pushed into Darcy's hand had the Avon logo on it, and Darcy looked at it, and then looked up into Jane's eyes again, and concluded that she was really desperate to cheer Thor up.
 
 
 
 
She wasn't allowed any electronics this time, going in. Not even paper and pencil, since they were still trying to figure out exactly how far Loki's influence could go. But she was surprised at how good her memory got once they started talking. She was pretty sure it wasn't some sinister thing, just the same thing that had allowed her to get through exams when she'd been playing Angry Birds during the lectures. Not to brag or anything, because Tony pretty well filled up the Tower bragging quota by the end of lunchtime, and Thor took what was left, but she had pretty kickass auditory recall.

Which meant, she figured, when, six months later, she finally got the—okay, actually super-exciting—experience of seeing Castles of Ice, Hearts Aflame, by Louisa D'orsay, on Avon's website, that if anything went wrong this time, it was all definitely Jane's fault.

Just in case anyone asked.