Chapter Text
“You got pregnant while the universe was ending?!”
Darcy rolled her eyes and turned around to face her bestie. “No, I met him during the convergence, he got me pregnant after.” She poked a finger at what used to be her toaster. Then Jane had gotten a hold of it and now it was a delicate instrument of science.
Jane heaved a long suffering sigh as though she had to deal with everyone coming to her with their unplanned pregnancy announcements. “And how did you meet up with him again after the convergence?”
Probably, she shouldn't tell Jane about the men chasing him or all the guns and knives he had had to take off before he removed his clothes. “We ran into each other a couple days later, on my way to work. I called in sick.” She shrugged because that was as close as she was going to get to the truth. She loved Jane, and she didn't like lying to her, but she also didn't like upsetting her. If she told Jane all about him, she would surely worry over Darcy's safety which would lead to them both losing sleep. Jane's surprise safety drills were a crime against humanity.
Jane narrowed her pretty brown eyes (deceptively Disney like), “I remember that. You didn't call in sick, you called in horny. Twice!” Heh, that's right. “That's this guy?”
“I have it on good authority that you were just as busy as I was.”
Sailing right on past, Jane got back to the topic at hand. “Alright, so are you going to tell him?”
Here it comes. “No.” Jane startled, clearly she had expected Darcy to say yes. “I would, but we didn't really exchange numbers, or names for that matter.”
Jane sucked in a lungful of air with a hiss. “Darcy,” It was pretty impressive how much scandalized horror Jane could fit into just her name. “What if he infected you with a venereal disease? What if it hurts the baby? What if its some new strain of super herpes? Didn't you use any of those condoms I gave you?” Jane grabbed her hand and gave it an urgent tug. “We need to get you tested right now!”
Darcy was so flabbergasted, that she allowed Jane to lead her all the way out of the lab and into the hall before her mouth and body caught up with her brain. She yanked her arm free. “Super herpes? Do you hear yourself?” She forced a incredulous laugh from her throat. “Are you serious right now?”
“It's very real, don't laugh!” Jane had always been a little fanatical about sexual hygiene education. Odd, since for all her doctorates, she still couldn't manage to work a dishwasher.
Darcy placed both her hands on Jane's shoulder and leaned in. After two and half years together, Darcy knew when Jane was gearing up for a lecture. “Look, I already made an appointment with an OB/GYN in town. You can come with me and make sure the doctor tests for super herpes, okay?”
Her friend was giving her a dead eye stare that had made lesser humans tuck tail. “You're making fun of me, but I'm still coming.”
Darcy didn't have the self-control to smother her grin. “Are you going to make a list of invasive questions with color coded charts?”
Jane shrugged off Darcy's hands and walked past her and back into the lab. “You'll thank me later.” Darcy's laughter echoed in the empty hallway.
The doctor informed her that she was a day shy of seven weeks and that the black speck in the middle of her screen was her baby. Jane had paused in her aggressive interrogation long enough to coo over its thrumming heartbeat. Darcy just squinted at the screen and tilted her head from side to side. Eventually, it would start looking humanoid. For now it looked like a trembling pinto bean.
Thor came for a visit two weeks after that and upon landing in Jane's backyard, congratulated Darcy on her growing progeny. He then presented her with a two-headed baby goat. Thor explained that it was a customary gift for expecting mothers. Darcy named the kid Craig.
While Darcy had been ready to chalk Thor's uncanny knowledge up to Asguardian voodoo, Jane wasn't quiet as convinced. The poor guy cracked in under a minute. Evidently, Thor was just as overprotective of the people he considered his as his lady love, Jane, was. They were perfect for each other. Heimdall was a saint for putting up with Thor's super billion light-year stalking. Then again, he was probably thinking the same thing of Darcy, when he had to witness Jane lecturing her about the importance of glow in the dark safety paint.
Life was good, even if she had morning sickness four out of seven days. Jane was back in her lab at Culver with Thor on an extended Earth vacation. Erik was continuing his sabbatical while he considered a job offer from Stark Industries. And Darcy was crashing in Jane's guest room while she looked for a two bedroom apartment. One of the few hang ups they encountered in their group were Thor's feelings toward Darcy's baby daddy.
“He disrespects you and your unborn child by abandoning you so.” Thor implored, his head lowered to look her straight in the eye and his hand on her shoulder.
Darcy mimicked his position. “And I appreciate your concern, but banishing him from our realm is overkill. First, and most importantly, because he doesn't even know I'm pregnant.”
Thor heaved the same bone deep sigh she had come to expect from Jane. “Ignorance is no excuse.”
“In this case it is.” She said earnestly. This was the fourth time they had had the conversation and Thor had only touched down nine days ago. “Lets meet in the middle here and save judgment of his character for after I tell him that he's got a kid on the way.”
Thor tilted his chin up and turned to look out into the sunset. Damn. Sometimes he was just so majestic that it made Darcy feel like a potato. After a moment of thought, he turned back to her and gave a slow nod. “Very well, I accept your concession.”
Darcy gave him a wide smile and a thump on his tree trunk of an arm. “Look at you being all princely and diplomatic.”
He returned the smile but the twinkle in his eye left her with a sudden uneasy feeling. “I shall find him and bring him to face his responsibilities as is expected of any man, mortal or not.”
An exaggerated groan erupted from her throat as she let her head fall back. Over dramatic, sure. Called for, definitely. “How are you even going to find him?” Chances were, she would never see the father of her child again and Thor, for all his abilities couldn't help with that.
As though he knew what she was thinking, his smile brightened a thousand more watts. “The Widow has assured me that she can track him down.”
Alright, its perfectly understandable that her jaw dropped a little. It wasn't every day The Black Widow, fighter of aliens and super spy extraordinaire, offered to track your MIA baby daddy down. Darcy just stared at Thor stupidly as her brain tried to wrap around the image of the lurid red headed woman choking her mystery guy into submission with her legendary thighs of fury.
“If you'll give me a description, I can pass it along to Natasha so that she may begin her search.”
Darcy's own father had run off before her gender had been determined. Her mother had left the same trail of dust after birth. Fortunately her paternal grandmother was a saint and had raised her before dying during her first year of college. Darcy wasn't her mother and the nameless father wasn't her father. It had been convenient that she had no way to contact him before, but it hadn't been very responsible. Her kid deserved to know his or her father and he deserved to know his kid. And if he didn't want to then Darcy didn't need him. Also, Thor would probably banish him to the far side of the moon.
“Um, blue eyes and brown hair, like shoulder length.” She made a cutting motion above her shoulder to show a vague sense of where his hair had fallen. “He's really muscley and tall, like six foot? Maybe?” Darcy hesitated to add the last, and probably most helpful portion of her description. “And he's got a robot arm with a red star on the shoulder.”
Thor blinked. “A robot arm?” He rolled the words around on his tongue with a frown.
“Yeah, I guess he was in an accident or something and someone built him a new one.” Darcy shifted from one foot to the other. He had shied away from her when she had made to touch it several times. It wasn't hard to see that the prosthetic bothered him and she felt like she was crossing a boundary by mentioning it to other people even if it was for a good cause. “Actually, it was pretty advanced tech, he might work for SHIELD.”
A scowl darkened Thor's usually sunny features. “An agent of SHIELD left you with child?”
Darcy fixed him with a glower of her own. “Seriously?”
The rehashing of their argument was put on hold when Jane stuck her head out of the kitchen door that lead to the back porch. “Dinner's ready and since you two didn't help you can wash dishes.” And then she had slipped back inside.
Darcy turned to Thor with the biggest kitty eyes she could manage. “I'm pregnant and my feet hurt.” She even stuck out her lower lip for good measure. The look he leveled her with let her know that he didn't believe a word.
SHEILD fell in the last week of April. Three fiery helicarriers lit up the D.C. skyline and every news network across the world. Most of it was speculation. Someone had dumped SHEILD files on Wiki Leaks and every government had scrambled to grab what they could before burying it. The Director was dead, Stark had snapped up the second in command and a few hundred other high up agents and Captain America was unavailable for comment.
What this meant for Jane and Darcy, was that four fifths of Jane's research funds were no longer available and quite frankly, Culver, where they were based, couldn't afford to pick up the slack. Job offers had been pouring in after the events in London when all of Jane's theories were proven correct. A lot of big names had had to swallow their pride and give public and formal apologies for ridiculing Jane's research for the chance to work with Jane. Jane could hold a grudge longer than the Hatfield's and McCoy's and still manage to be twice as bitter. Not that Darcy blamed her, some of them had been downright vicious over the years.
Besides a lack of funding, there was now a gaping chasm in security. As proven when some group calling itself AIM had attempted to steal Jane's work while she and Darcy were still there. It became abundantly clear that the team of three men hadn't expected the two women to still be working so late into the night. They also hadn't expected Thor to bring down the hammer on them. Utter obliteration doesn't quite convey the aftermath of Thor's rage.
Darcy got an email from CEO Pepper Potts that night on behalf or Stark Industries. A clever move since Darcy only checked Jane's email once a week. Knowing Jane would decline out of spite for the condom bouquet Stark had sent Thor after London, Darcy hammered out the details with Ms. Potts before presenting the contract to Jane and urging her to read it over.
It could have been the millions in funds thrown at her, it could have been all of the resources SI had at its disposal or it could have been the salary. Personally, Darcy thought Jane's mind had been made up as soon as she had read clause eighteen, and then reread it with a manic grin. She was reasonably sure Tony Stark himself had added it to the contract. Clause eighteen was a thing of beauty and promised that SI and Mr. Stark himself would devote their combined might to humiliate Dr. Reed Richards at least twice a year, but exceeding no more than five times.
Darcy liked to think that a shiver ran down the pompous scientist's spine as Jane signed the contract with an unholy giggle. Thor had certainly looked ill-at-ease upon witnessing it. Erik, who hated Richards as much as anyone who had ever talked to him, finally signed his own SI contract.
Two days later, the moving vans pulled up to move Jane, Erik, Thor and Darcy to New York. Jane's research and equipment went to her new lab in Stark Tower while her personal belongings were moved to a loft apartment in one of the new post Chitauri apartment buildings in Manhattan. Erik bought a duplex in Queens and leased the other half to Darcy. It was for the best, Erik was one pantsless outing from a sex offenders registry. Also, they could carpool together and Craig the goat had a fenced in back yard to roam.
And for almost two whole weeks, it was quiet and normalish. Erik was happily whittling away at a bunch of numbers on a whiteboard in a lab the next floor up. Probably in only his saggy old man underwear. Sometimes he ditched the shirt too but never his socks and shoes. Jane was at her home riding Thor like a prize bronco at the Texas State Rodeo. And Darcy was catching up on filing and professional correspondence while jamming out to her favorite headbanger tunes. A guilty pleasure Jane hated.
Dragonforce was testing the limits of the supposed sound proofing in the walls when Darcy looked up and saw a red headed woman sitting one of the guest chairs in front of the desk. Her yelp was thankfully inaudible over the screaming guitar riff. Darcy scrambled for the stereo remote to turn the music off. Once that was done, she turned to the woman with a too wide smile fully prepared to pretend she hadn't just been rocking out in her bosses office.
“Hi, how may I help you?” Darcy repressed the grimace that wanted to form from the overly commercial tone.
The red heads vaguely curious expression transformed into one of amusement. Well at least the impression of amusement. It was hard to tell. She was almost like one of those old Macy's mannequin's before their heads were replaced with twenty percent off offers.
“Thor asked for my help in locating your,” She paused, the corner of her lips tugging up just a hint more. “wayward lover.”
There was no stopping the grimace this time. Thor and his outdated way of speaking was going to give her a complex one day. The full sentence finally catching up with her, she started. “Oh! You're the Black Widow.” Wow.
Darcy didn't know what she expected, but she was still impressed. This woman with her glass face and cat-like posture was everything Darcy had wanted to be as a little girl. That kind of sensuality wasn't in the cards for Darcy, but damn this woman was working it.
“I prefer Natasha when I'm not working.”
Okay, so Darcy may have been a little starstruck. It was perfectly understandable. “So, uh, what can I do for you?”
Natasha tilted her head to the side. “The description Thor gave was lacking in viable information and heavy in insults. I was hoping you could give me something more to go on.”
Darcy could just hear the grim promise to reeducate any man who'd abandoned his progeny and their mother in such a manner. “Really, you don't have to do this. I'm sure you've got so many more important things you'd rather do.”
“I've been looking at the search as a relaxing distraction.”
That poor bastard didn't know what was coming for him. “Alright...”