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It wasn’t unusual for the people of Texcoco to receive the visit of Pochteca on their market.
The market of Texcoco was indeed the best for wares such as clothes, fabrics and pottery, and every Mexica knew that.
The travelling merchants would come for the day and leave during the night.
And people knew better than to ask around. Pochteca were a fixture of Mexica’s life.
What Mexica knew about them was that they were merchants, they travelled for solar cycles the whole length of the Empire, they had Guilds and not much else.
What the Leaders of the Mexica knew was that they were their valuable spies . For cycles, the Pochteca had been used by them to keep informed about the comings and goings of the Empire. Training merchants to collect gossips and create nets of informants, to become invisible among people, to be amicable and spontaneous every time had required time and resources, and a lot of secrecy, to the point that no one exactly knew just how much power they held, but it had been extremely worth it.
What the People and the Leaders didn’t know, was that the nomadic structure of their job, the secrecy wrapping the Guild and the increased obscurantism of the actual rules and privileges of the Pochteca had quickly become a much-exploited breeding ground for the Shapeshifters.
Shapeshifters had indeed infiltrated the social class since the first moments the Pochteca had started travelling. It had started innocently enough: twenty merchants left, twenty-two came back. The twenty would think the two more were from another Guild, an outsider would think they were together. And they looked exactly like them too. Same body paint, same distinctive jewellery.
And so it went for Reeds and Rabbits for entire cycles, until no one was able to distinguish one another and no one suspected anything.
The substitution ‘game’ went so far that as soon as a Pochteca died, a Shapeshifter was ready to replace him, until the whole Guild in the depths of Texcoco was entirely composed of them.
And they were great workers, too. They followed every societal rule and tradition, didn’t raise suspicion and were a hundred percent integrated into the life of the city they lived in. And they loved it. They didn’t really understand the religion or their strong belief that the Gods were feeding the Sun, but they understood that it was important enough to keep pretending anyway.
They did however start wearing their marks and their jewels. After a while, these traits were believed appropriate for their Guild, and no one was the wiser.
For years, the Shapeshifters had watched the Mexica grow and flourish, and they’d wanted to be part of it. Of course, being a creature of the size of a cantaloupe (a big cantaloupe!) with furry ears and fluffy tails wouldn’t have allowed for much recognition.
So they had trained their abilities until their mimicry of a human was perfect.
And it was. They were.
They had normal lives in the city, with tiny houses and ate alongside everyone else. And once they had their cover established, it was hard to ‘blow it’. Any changes to their appearance could be easily explained with the passing of time, and so would their long life. It wasn’t unusual for them do die and come back a few cycles later as the daughter, son, niece.
It was easy, and it was fun .
Sometimes the cover would fail, or they’d be found out by curious kids.
This made the game super fun .
It soon spread the voice that Gods were in the forest and that they would punish the unworthy. Indeed, Shapeshifters had a penchant for mind reading and interesting defense mechanisms that went from poison to causing blindness, but from that to Gods ? And then, a kid had been grievously injured and the tiny creatures, who pitied the family of the kid, agreed that yes, their sacred jewel would be used to heal him. It was pandemonium.
A shrine was built in the middle of the forest, to the Sacred Gods of Luck.
It was unanimously decided that no longer the covers would have to fail, and so they trained even harder.
In this mess that was the Shapeshifter’s cover, Itotia was born from a completely normal and unassuming couple of Shapeshifter merchants.
Well, if we wanted to be technical, her name was something that sounded more like ‘She who looks ahead, shields her eyes and stares at the Sun’, but such sounds weren’t reproducible by human tongue, and so it was decided that giving her a second name which could be used by the neighbours was a sound idea.
Her parents were very proud to say she had a happy and normal childhood, too. Women were not barred from the trading profession like they were from military, and it was general consensus that women’s merchandise was much finer and better than men’s when it came to textile, and so Itotia had been trained since she was very young to become a Pochteca along with the other kids.
It was three full cycles later, when Itotia had become her son, and then her niece, her son’s daughter and then her granddaughter that she seriously started training as a ‘spy’.
It wasn’t that Itotia didn’t care for that kind of training, she just didn’t deem it a necessary skill.
Her breed’s evasion techniques had been legendary and the myth had grown during the three cycles.
Despite their vow not to appear to humans anymore, someone had, because the Shrine had become a full Temple and then two more, with a very accurate giant depiction of one of them plastered at the middle, an enormous Ruby on its forehead and the fluffy tail bejewelled with obsidian gems. It was a scary sight.
And so the Guild in the bowels of the city had tightened the borders of its domain and enforced a harder training regime.
Itotia had her eyes open to infinite possibilities. How in the name of the Sun had she never left her village? The freedom that kind of training had given her was immense. No one batted an eye when she left for days, and no one blinked when she came back. It was just a given that a wandering merchant knew what they were doing.
She travelled all over the Empire. She had finally found what her people had told her and she had never believed all along: the Empire was vast, huge and hers.
She wandered so far she added not one, but four different gemstones to her tail.
And it was no small thing at all!
You had to earn your stones, by finding and carving them and then, you had to harness their power. Usually, Shapeshifters were content to add one or two gemstones at most. The more powerful, the fewer gems you would add.
People envied those who could put their fluffy paws on important gems like Sapphires, the gem with the power of empathy and Love, or Rubies, the power of Strength. However, they were extremely rare gems to find without being seen at all, and sometimes they were also found outside the Empire’s borders.
Itotia hadn’t been so lucky to find any of the powerful ones. She had found some Fluorite, which was great but not really, Amethyst because there was so much of it near the forest of the Southern Borders, and a large chunk of Obsidian (which she might or not have stolen from carvers before they actually got it from the Cave they had found it in).
She was, however, coming back with her latest find and fourth gem to date, a tiny Opal that was about to become her favourite. The council hadn’t been impressed with her findings, after all.
While they commended her for her relentless pursuit of new achievements, they had hoped she would come back with less extravagant and more, well, powerful symbols for her use.
Emeralds would have been preferable, they’d said, with their incredible resilience power.
Itotia had felt annoyed at the Elder’s words.
The little things hadn’t been easy to find and carve, and they had their own special powers too.
And sure, maybe they weren’t powerful gems, but they were many and she’d gotten them all by herself. She called it a victory.
It was then, at the end of the fourth cycle of life of the Mexica, that men came to Motecuhzoma, riding creatures they had never seen and demanding obedience.
Motecuhzoma, believing they were the coming of the Gods, had been welcoming at first, but the men were no Gods, the Shapeshifters knew. Their bodies were white, but their souls were dark and murky.
The newcomers eyed everything avidly and had no respect for what their eyes touched.
And suddenly merchants started to die.
Sudden death was not something the Pochteca were unused to, the merchants usually travelled in small groups and feral beasts were all too happy to chew on them, and so did slave traders, but not so many and so quickly.
Every spy knew, that killing merchants in the Empire was an act of war.
The Shapeshifters watched uneasily as their Emperor ignored the signs and kept pretending that the new men weren’t somehow involved with the economy-crippling news.
The fifth cycle was starting, the sun just sealing the fourth cycle in fire, when the Emperor declared that the Mexica Empire was now going to follow the white men coming from the sea.
Foreign practises entered their society, starting from having to cover themselves to the brutalizing of the Gods temples.
The Pochteca had lost jurisdiction over themselves and could no longer be of use to the Emperor.
It was the start of hard times for the Shapeshifters, so used to freedom and love from the people they lived with.
However, the last straw came when the Leader of the Men demanded he be brought to the Temple of the Gods of Luck.
He watched fascinated the golden slabs and tables, and was transfixed by the giant statue of the creature.
He started asking questions through his interpreters and the Mexica were all too happy to answer: they were the Gods of Fortune, the jewel on the head could heal all evil! They punished the unworthy, but lavished praise on the just, and yes, of course, they were real.
It was then that the Leader’s eyes filled with unholy glee, and started darting all over, in search of the magical creature, presumably.
When he asked for a name, however, he was met with silence. The creatures had never spoken, they had no name.
He scoffed then, for the creatures could of course not talk, for they were not human, and started demanding that one be brought to him.
Before the sun was out seven times, money and riches were offered to those who would bring to him a ‘magic Carbunco’.
Had it been the Mexica looking for them, they’d have probably enjoyed the chase. But these strange men had no love for them, and no good intentions.
After the sun was out twelve times, entire cities had been burnt to the ground to find one of them. Many of the ‘conquistadores’ had perished, becoming blind or sporting other terrible maladies, but the Leader was not discouraged.
It was too much, all too much.
The Shapeshifters, or Carbuncos now for the outsiders, were less than impressed, scared even, of the new development.
The Elders held council, and decided it was time for them to disappear once more. They ignored the pleas of their people to fight, to help the Mexica, for fear for their brothers and sons won over what was right, and commanded everyone to leave.
Every Shapeshifter of the Empire was summoned to the Guild that night, and before the sun was up, the whole merchant guild of Texcoco was no more.
Itotia watched with her people as the world of the Mexica burned.
Soon they all fell prey to inertia, too scared to move from the Cave they’d run off to, and they went back to what they were.
They became stone, and watched as the years passed them by.
She was tired.
And it was dark, so dark.
Where was she?
But she was so so tired.
She came to some time later, and it was dark.
It was always dark.
She closed her eyes again, sleepily.
When she opened them again, it was dark.
Until suddenly, it wasn’t.
Her eyes widened as she focused on a single, shining point on what she assumed was her tail.
It… it kind of looked like her Shimmer stone? It was! It was her favourite stone, her tiny ‘stupid’ Opal!
She was so glad she could see it again, she’d missed her tiny treasure.
And as she focused on the corn seed sized gem, the light magnified until she could see the whole of her fluffy tail. It was exactly like she remembered it!!
This also gave her an idea. She had had a rough idea of the powers of the Opal, mostly about clairvoyance and seeing the unseen, but she would never have guessed it was meant to be so literal! The more she focused on her gem, the more she could see again, until she could see all of herself.
How weird! She… didn’t look like stone? She was fluffy, and furry, and… small. She sighed dejectedly. Fine.
She shook herself. Right, no time to lose in here.
She floated a bit around, looking for familiar faces in the blackness that was around her.
Wait a minute. Floated?
She was.
What a strange feeling, now that she reconsidered. Well, she wasn’t feeling anything at all, actually.
Apart from weightless? She tried moving a bit her paws, like she would if she’d be walking, but the movements felt sloppy and weak.
She shook her tail in annoyance, and felt herself gently propelling forward. Are you kidding me?
She tried again, and this time tried to make a somersault. It came to her as easy as breathing.
Apparently standing upright on the ground was no longer a thing. What an exciting discovery.
She who watches the Sun was elated. What had happened? Why wasn’t she tethered to the ground anymore?
And on second thought, where was the ground?
Unconsciously, she reached for the Central Stone on her forehead. It shone brightly, looking for danger and for the first time since forever, the Shapeshifter had to shield her eyes.
Where was she?
It… it didn’t look like her home at all.
It was… colours.
Colours and colours one over the other in a never-ending stream of lights that she hadn’t noticed in the dark.
It was reds and blues and colours she’d never seen in her life. She struggled to find names to any of them, and, in the end, gave up.
This place, wherever this was, was huge. No horizon, no sun or stars to guide her, just colours and streaks of light.
She wandered aimlessly around, her tail moving like she was swimming in a big lake or a river.
As she moved around, her long ear touched a streak of red floating lazily above her. It contorted a little, and butterflies came out of it.
Her eyes widened.
What was that?
Out of curiosity, she touched a blue one, and one of the huge animals the foreigners had with them trotted out.
She ran as fast as she could in that weird floaty space.
She spent an indefinite amount of time looking at the streaks. There were so many!
After a while, though, she grew bored of the solitude.
It was then, when she was lazily touching a green streak, that a human face appeared. He was laughing at something. She quickly approached him, finally, she’d found someone, but the image disappeared before her.
She almost cried. Don’t go, please!
But it wasn’t real, not really.
She started feeling frustrated. So frustrated that the next streak that passed by her, she headbutted, hard.
Her Opal sparked, and she was sucked in with a scream and a single popping sound.
Itotia landed with a loud thud.
“Ow, ow, that hurt, ” she mumbled, stroking her arms with her hands.
Wait.
She was human looking. She was human again. She tripped as soon as she tried to stand.
Ow, she was so unused to stand on two legs. Her hands flew to her back, pressing on the lower backside to soothe the muscles.
She looked around, trying to find out where she was.
A dolphin the size of her hand swam rapidly at her eye level.
What.
A multitude of miniature creatures followed the first one.
This was not normal.
Admittedly, she hadn’t seen much outside the Empire, but she was absolutely certain this wasn’t how fish worked.
She followed the fishes cautiously, half noticing that she was at the bottom of the Ocean and was breathing without problems, despite her not having gills.
She found a man in the middle of it all.
He was dressed in something she’d never seen, and was counting the miniature dolphins while discarding the tiny whales.
“Hey!” she called, excited. She was pretty sure that if she had a tail it would be wagging right now.
The man seemed surprised to see her.
“Hey…?” he parroted.
“Hi! I’m…” Well, no matter. “Do you know where we are? I think I got lost!”
The man frowned, deep in thought. “I… don’t know either”
Oh. Well, that was disappointing.
Without really thinking about it, she had her Central Gem reach for the man’s mind.
While usually, mind reading was a perfect and precise art, there was always something going behind a human’s pretty face, after all, this time she only got colours and impressions. She concentrated a bit more.
Nothing but the gentle rising and falling of a chest and steady breathing. Wha -Oh .
This man was sleeping.
She almost fell to the ground.
This man wasn’t awake, he was sleeping in his bed, as far away as possible from the bottom of the ocean.
Her eyes flew to her body, uncaring of the man’s alarmed stare in front of her antics, and fell on the bracelet she had wrapped around her ankle. The tiny Opal was shining gaily.
None of this was real. The mind shimmer stone had brought her to The Dream World.
The man was growing increasingly worried about her unresponsiveness, the Ocean around them wavering a bit, but she didn’t care enough, fascinated by the new discovery.
She’d heard voices and whispers of course of Shapeshifters becoming so attuned to Mind energy that they could move to the Dream World, but she’d never guessed that she would be one. This was what they meant with total freedom.
This was… awesome.
She hugged the man excitedly, shouting “this is a dream!” over and over until the poor human felt dizzy about it all.
So dizzy in fact, that he woke up with a start.
She saw a flash of his gasping awake face, and he was gone from the Dream.
She was back into the expanse of colours.
But what an expanse it was!
The Dream World, for lack of a better term (because she wasn’t going to call it ‘The place where’s too much color and I can see just what about everyone is dreaming of’), was infinite and there was nothing boring about it, once you knew how it worked.
The best part of it, there was always someone dreaming. Certainly, there must be more people than she’d thought there were! The units of Texcoco were a lot, but here, there were many many more!
And it wasn’t just humans dreaming either. She’d entered dreams of big cats, dogs, some birds even. They were distinguishable from humans’ ones, their color was much duller and the streaks tinier.
But humans, oh wow, humans were awesome.
They had so much fantasy in their veins, they were basically made of liquid magic.
Her favourite dreams were the ones kids had. So colorful and magical, and she never had to explain how a tiny Carbunco could talk. It wasn’t to say that she’d always been a catlike creature in dreams.
Sometimes the Dreamer would give her a human shape, sometimes she’d be a bird or a lizard. It made her feel strange, but also excited every time it happened. Who knew what kind of adventure was coming her way!
She’d been hunting treasures in volcanos, cuddling on mountains of leaves with kids and also made strange piles of stones on the beach with others.
She could enter a dream, live a fantastic story and then just jump straight into another as soon as the first Dream ended.
And humans also dreamed in such a small amount of time. The tangible dream lasted no longer than a few sand-drops instead of the hours they spent in there, so she visited dozens and dozens before getting tired.
What tiredness, too! She was mind, she was dream, there was nothing to stop her from this endless exploration.
No matter if she could never leave the rock prison she’d been self-encased into by her inertia, this was her place now and she intended to make the best of it.
Some dreams were better than others, depending on her mood.
She quickly learned that the red streaks shouldn’t really be touched, unless she wanted more lessons in human anatomy which she really didn’t need, and that the green ones were the peaceful ones where one could just relax for ages.
If she felt playful, she could go for the yellow ones.
And of course, there were thousands of variations.
Some people had the most unpredictable dreams. The rules of reality didn’t matter to their dreams, and more often than not the Shapeshifter found herself upside down, bigger than a mountain or even as small as an ant.
Others had the most organized mind she’d ever seen. She found herself in huge halls filled to the brim with what she was told were ‘books’. Apparently ‘libraries’ were extremely common ‘now’.
In these dreams, she usually spent a lot of time cajoling the owners to teach her how to read and speak that language, or straight up read it to her.
She had no idea of when was ‘now’, but she had a rough idea of the ‘where’.
After a while, she had started to compile a mental map of the world, which was much bigger than the Empire and the Forest of the South, as much as that one had been big and menacing with its huge trees and river. Finding that the Lake was not, in fact, the biggest expanse of water had been a revelation. There were four ‘Oceans’ and they were huge, and land peppered all over the world .
And then she found out the Empire was nothing but a little spot in Central America, and that much bigger Empires had been built and then had crumbled.
Which brought her to the ‘when’ question. And that had not been fun at all.
She was used to ‘Reeds’ and ‘Fish’ and ‘Rabbits’ and cycles. She was absolutely unprepared to deal with ‘months’, ‘years’ and ‘centuries’. Also because not everyone she spoke with used the same calendar. Those lessons had taken various dreams and even more patience to apprehend and absorb (she believed Reeds were a much more efficient way to calculate time, but what did she know…).
“You came!” A girlish squeal behind her made her turn and smile toothily. The kid was adorable.
“Of course I did! I would never miss our ghost hunting adventures!”
Well, this is one murky thing , was her first thought as soon as she entered the dream.
She was used to strange happenings in the strange world that was Dreams, but she had never seen something quite like this.
Oh no, don’t misunderstand, she had seen nightmares. They were sick and huge like the horses the ‘conquistadores’ had brought with them, scary and sometimes sca ly . They tainted the dream and made everything look dreary and out of control.
It usually ended on good notes though, whether because the dreamer woke up or found a way to thwart the monsters.
But this, this was much worse. It was corrupt and oppressive.
She waded through the disgusting waters, so thick she could almost smell and taste the sick feeling on her tongue and under her nose.
There were no colors in this place.
What was this!
A ball of rage coiled in her chest. How dare this thing exist in her world.
She who looks at the Sun frowned and started approaching the centre of the problematic thing.
As she approached it, she could feel the putrid smell coming to her nose. She froze. Smells didn’t transfer to the dream world. She couldn’t believe her eyes, either.
It was a Mare .
Big and ugly, it was chewing on the body of a young man. She never thought she’d meet one.
It sniffed loudly and turned towards her, its mouth dripping with saliva and other disgusting things she didn’t care to name.
It screeched warningly, and she felt her old flight instincts flare. This creature was not a figment of imagination, and could well decide to kill her, if need be. She would not be immune or saved from an attack. She should just… back away and let it do its… job.
She lowered her head non-threateningly and backed away slowly.
The Mare sneered a bit and went back to its chewing.
But then the human soul it was feasting on tried to fight back.
Flashes of the people they had abandoned appeared in front of her eyes, and she felt like crying. Was she going to just abandon this man, too?
She couldn’t. She steeled her spine. She wasn’t.
The Central Stone on her head activated and let out an impressive stream of light.
The Mare shouted, screeched and contorted. It turned towards her in an impressive show of rage and fury.
She ran.
The creature had no longer interest in the human, who woke up screaming.
They were back to the expanse of colors, and they were alone.
The Carbunco watched in distress as the monster reached the conclusion that this was the central node of every dream, and using this place it could reach any person in the universe, because it made a guttural sound of victory and flashed its teeth at her.
This wasn’t happening .
The Mare reached for a streak of gold right behind it.
She knew that dream owner, she thought in panic, this thing is not going in there .
She charged again.
This time, she focused on the Mare’s mind. It was a disgusting place to be, but this action gave the desired results.
The Central Stone that activated to punish the unworthy, the jewel that had given her people so much grief, let out an angry hiss and a red flash passed in front of her eyes.
The Mare screamed, and then there was silence.
Itotia, the dancer, She who watches the Sun, stared blankly at the ashes left by the horrid creature.
As soon as she blinked, a dark stream swept them away.
She exhaled loudly, spent.
It was the first time in cy- in years that she’d ever been so scared.
But the altercation also left her oddly satisfied and proud of herself.
She rewarded herself with a pat on the back, and launched into the greenest stream she could find.
She could do with a few hours of basking. Or a century.
In hindsight, the Carbuncle should have realized earlier that she couldn’t possibly have been the only creature existing in this different plane. The fact that she’d never met anyone else didn’t mean she was alone.
She thus made her mission to check for polluted dreams any time she could.
For as much as she was scared of bigger and more powerful creatures, she felt it was her duty, as only being able to intervene --unless Others were watching from Above-- to try and save as many souls as she could.
Sometimes she managed.
Other times not even her Gem was powerful enough.
Times and times again the tiny carbunco fought for the Dreams of the humans.
And before she knew it, she had become a legend for the humans, as a woman had excitedly told her one day (or night). The Magical Carbuncle, protector of Dreams. Well, wow .
While the idea of having become a hero made her cartwheel around (lack of gravity? it was the best, and she’d just learned it existed!), she also felt woefully unprepared for whatever she’d face next.
Surely, if one Mare had found itself into her Ocean -- for lack of a better name --, others could follow, and what if this time she faced something bigger? The threats she had faced so far were no more than other little monsters. One time she’d even met a Baku, but that one had been a gentle creature, and had backed off pretty quickly after some stern talking to.
Nothing sounded scarier than something even bigger, but maybe it was an actual thing.
What, then?
Physical Training was hardly an option. She’d learnt the hard way that muscle memory was not a thing when you’re an incorporeal being made out of people’s fantasies. What if she trained hard to become invincible in carbuncle form, and then was transfigured into a goldfish for the fight? No guarantees meant the option wasn’t really viable.
Which left her with her mind, knowledge and her four gems. Eeeeh .
For a brief second, she wished she had the really powerful gems on her tail, instead of four mildly powered healing stones.
She squashed that thought as soon as she formulated it. Thinking rationally, a young carbunco like she’d been, she wouldn’t have been able to hold a single stone before being too tired to properly learn to use them.
This left only one option: what she couldn’t have in power, she would have to make up for in smarts.
It was time to brush up the old lessons.
Going back with your memories to entire centuries before was extremely hard, but not as much as it would have been without an Obsidian or an Amethyst to help her out (she so envied those with a perfect memory, because this was hard ). Some things came to her easy like breathing, for others she had to meditate for hours and hours.
Itotia even made a point to stalk the dreams of organized people. Many of them had entire libraries she could cherry pick from and read whatever she liked. An extremely kind old woman had even answered a lot of questions she had on any book she had read, and they were many.
(“So, uhm, don’t think badly of me but… I don’t like Mrs Bennet.”
“Oh, silly goose, no one likes Mrs Bennet!”
“Oh. ...What’s this theory of Evolution you were talking about?”)
The creatures she encountered, however, didn’t change one iota and while the fact that nothing scarier than another Mare had crossed her path should have made her relax, she was growing anxious for who knew what reason.
She didn’t know why or how, but something was coming.
She still kept her light shining over as many people as she could.
It was times like these, that She who watches the Sun wished she’d been wrong.
So very, very wrong.
But she hadn’t been.
She had been right, and this was not something she could ever be prepared to.
It had started with blue, curiously enough.
While ‘blue’ was hardly an explanation, it was something she’d always associated with focus or duty. And it usually reflected on dreams. People who needed some order in their life dreamed blue most of the time, as did students and factory workers. Soldiers dreamed blue, too.
Recently, however, many more people had started changing the course of their streams. It wasn’t uncommon for dreams to change directions, she’d seen it, especially with young kids, whose dreams changed every twist and turn of their colorful streak. But it was never like this.
And it… she didn’t like it one bit.
The streaks were calm at first, and then twisted painfully into something that resembled thinly veiled panic, to basically blow up into full mode craziness.
Many of the streaks died midstream.
It was terrible to watch, but even penetrating the minds of these people didn’t yield any conclusive answer.
What was happening to the world of men, that it would cause so much panic?
The answer came to her from the dream of a young kid.
François wasn’t very focused on the dream, it was hazy at best and he kept waking up at the most inconvenient of times (and certainly his parents thought so too), but he’d been extremely helpful.
There was war in the world.
A full-blown, massive scale war, bigger than even her old Empire (and yes, after four hundred years she could say it was old) with its 24.000 units could ever have conceived.
All the blue were soldiers, in trenches, suffering.
And she could do nothing, but watch. Again.
She spent the entirety of these years like a lighthouse, hoping to soothe the spirits of the people that passed by her.
Nothing seemed to work.
So, she did the only thing that she used to do whenever such a problem arose. Like she had with the other magical creatures as soon as the Mare had appeared, she went back to studying.
And had the world expanded in the last fifty years! She could hardly believe so much progress had been done in so little time, compared to other previous discoveries.
The world was, once again, a mine of information and a wealth of notions. She could probably keep busy for the next… three hundred years!
And it was in this climate of rebirth and rebuilding, of watching people grow strong from the catastrophe they’d been through all on their own , that her metaphysical world of dreams changed colors again.
This time, the streak’s color was gold.
It was, well, in poor words, beautiful. Shiny and rich and sparkly, it was the purest color she’d ever seen in a dream. Ever.
She itched to visit it. But she didn’t want to spoil it. What if this became a lucid dream? She’d never been in something this big.
Curiosity won after the fourth time she floated by the streak. She’d kept busy with other dreams, content to just watch it from afar, but…
She sighed, and entered the dream with a swishing sound.
That is one detailed dream. She thought awed.
It was just so detailed and precise. So similar to reality as she knew it, despite it being seen with her dreamers’ eyes.
Today she was a nurse, apparently.
She checked herself into a nearby mirror and yep, today she was human looking. A bit blonder than usual, but definitely female (it wasn’t a given).
She strolled carefully around the hospital she was in, careful to avoid the important parts of the dream. If she stayed carefully outside of it, just on the edges, the details were less accurate and she could watch the whole thing unfold without being found out.
“Why are you hiding, ma’am?”
How! Found out in less than thirty seconds!
She turned, her best patented fake smile firmly in place. “How can I help you, sir?” she asked, as nicely as she could.
It was a boy. Well, not really. He was definitely an adult, but he was also… well, skinny. The kind of skin and bones that would make a bad cat owner consider drowning him. And he looked ill. Or sick. Or a bit of both. He was definitely not well, anyway.
He was apparently the Dreamer, as luck would have it.
The young man frowned at her, not convinced, so the ‘nurse’ made a big show to look him up and down. “Young man, you should be in bed, looking like that!” He probably should.
But instead of looking chastened, he frowned even deeper. “This is the healthiest I’ve been, ma’am. Why are you hiding?”
She choked, incredulous. This was his healthiest? No, it wasn’t possible. This had to be one of his mind machinations. She’d seen it happen a lot, people not remembering their appearance or altering it to their wishes. Hey, their dream, their rules.
She reached slightly into his mind, and recoiled at the flash she got from him. Not only he hadn’t lied at all (he needed medical help alright, what was even that cough he had?), but his mind was as pure as his dreams. This was a good man, she’d never met someone so pure.
Well, yes, once three hundred years or so ago, but she did disappear after a while...
She broke into a wide smile that took him aback a little.
“I wasn’t. Well, yes I was hiding, from you, but eeeeh, you found me, so!” she shrugged. It was always best to go on with the flow if her half-assed diversion tactics didn’t work.
She could see the exact moment he realized this was a dream, because his eyes widened and the whole hospital shimmered almost into nothingness before coming back into focus. And then it disappeared, to make room for a thick golden mist, taking away everything that belonged with it.
She sighed dejectedly, looking at her paws. She had gone from looking at him from up to very down.
“Thanks,” she grouched.
His eyebrows reached his hairline now. He sputtered a bit. “Ma’am?”
“Yeah, no ma’am here,” she shook her head, and her ears flapped with her. Her tail patted around aimlessly until she found a solid and thick part of cloud she could climb on. She climbed on top of it and was happy to find she was almost eye level with him. Win!
“This is a dream, right?”
“Yes, it is,” she nodded, “I mean, it was a dream before you went and ruined it? Well, no, technically it was me, I shouldn’t have entered, you know? But it was such a nice color and I was curious, I’ve never seen such a good color before in a dream. I must say, it was most promising,” she babbled excitedly. “Do you like colors?”
The young man shook his head slightly. “Who are you and why are you in my dream?”
She coughed awkwardly. Okay, uhm, nope. She wasn’t giving him her real name, except maybe the precise pronunciation in her hissy tongue, think think think .
“I’m… Darcy!” she smiled toothily a him, showing off her tiny canines. Crap, that’s a man’s name, right? No matter. “And I live here. Between dreams, I mean. It’s... kind of my job,” she tried to shrug. She failed.
“Oh.” He seemed to ponder it over. “Are you real?”
“Of course I’m real!” she puffed up. “My body is still somewhere, around, I just don’t know where at the moment. But I’m very real. Used to live around with you, but then this happened …” she gestured to all of her.
He made a noise of understanding that let her know that he hadn’t really, but that was okay.
“I’m Steve,” he said instead, holding a hand out for her to shake.
People hardly remembered their dreams. She’d introduced herself at least fifty times to the same person.
But Steve did. He always did, every time she came back to visit him. And honestly, it was kind of great.
“And so you spend your existence jumping from a dream to another?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, scratching her ear with her paw. “I mean, not always. People dream in the span of a few minutes and I need to be quick in case something bigger and scarier than me enters where he shouldn’t, but sometimes, sure.” She smiled. “You humans are amazing. You’re made of liquid fantasy.”
He smiled back, but then started coughing a real deal. The dream faded slightly.
He was waking up. Again.
“You… you really need to do something for this, Steve,” she told him seriously, watching as the walls of gold came back slowly.
“Can’t really do anything about it but fight,” he said in response.
Darcy sighed and fixed her stare on her tail. The opal of dreams was always shimmering.
Well.
“I… think I may have an idea?” she mused aloud. Steve’s eyes tracked her immediately. “It’s… I’m not sure it’s even going to work, okay, but … my Central Stone.” And with her paw signed impatiently to her forehead. “I don’t know if it works in Dreams, but it’s supposed to heal all ills from those who are pure?”
Steve hesitated. “Is there a catch?”
This time it was Darcy who hesitated. Healing with the Central Stone was a Big Deal, in fact, she’d never tried it and probably would be unable to use her gem for a long while.
She didn’t need to say anything, because Steve had already guessed something similar and refused vehemently. “I won’t take another’s hope of salvation. I can still fight,” he smiled hesitantly, but before Darcy could really be reassured, he woke up.
She spent the next days waiting for his familiar, golden shine to show up.
But Steve didn’t dream at all.
And so, she went back to her constant watching and flashing and floating.
So focused she was on the nothings of her life, that she didn’t notice entering another dream, until she was free falling headfirst from what looked like three hundred feet. She flapped aimlessly, oh wait .
She had wings. She was a bird this time. Lucky!
Wings were something she had been very familiar with even before the dream world.
‘Darcy’ dove straight into the air. Flying was exhilarating.
Whoooosh .
“What-!” Something from her right flew right into her path and sent her careening to her left.
She turned right away, ready to give the air terrorist a piece of her mind, when she stopped. It was a flying car.
“Okay, this is new,” she blinked rapidly, trying not to forget to beat her wings in order not to fall.
Shiny red, glistening under the sun, the car was soaring through the clouds of a half covered sky.
This she had to see.
Of course, a bird, for as much as she was big and powerful in the current form, was hardly as fast as a car, but she tried her best to catch up anyway.
It turned out she really didn’t have to, because the car veered on the right again and landed with a loud thud .
A man in uniform came out exclaiming profanities.
Darcy mentally sighed. Yay . She debated long and hard whether or not approach the man, because he really didn’t seem in a good mood to tolerate talking birds of prey (despite them being awesome). She watched as the man insulted Howard’s Stark name and laughed at presumably himself, and promptly changed her judgement from ‘mad’ to ‘crazy’. That could work too.
“Are you okay?” she called from high above. She was not going anywhere close to the metal death trap of falling doom.
The young man’s head whipped towards her direction and his blue eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.
“What?” she asked, teasing. “You never seen a talking ...falcon? I am a falcon, right? The variations of your linguistics astound me.”
His mouth opened and closed a few times. “Am I dreaming?”
She laughed, as much as she could at least. “Maaaybe.” And dropped a few feet.
As it had happened with Steve, and this seriously needed to be investigated because lucid dreams didn’t usually lose the background this quick, the dream faded. But instead of finding herself into a nebulous ball of nothing with the young soldier, she felt herself shrink and in three seconds she was forcibly ejected from the dream. Woa .
He must have woken up startlingly fast.
But it was very clear, that wars had not gone out of fashion while she was poking her head somewhere else.
Blue upon blue became prominent once again and she watched stricken as more and more of the colors died to make space for panic and fear.
How did you stop something so big by, well, not being there ?
What a horrible position to be in.
Darcy -- the name had stuck, she kind of liked the sound-- wondered, once again, if her permanence in the Dream World was a curse or a blessing.
Then again, she thought, looking at her tiny stones of stupid inutility, it’s not like they’d make much of a difference, would they? It’s probably best I stick where I’m useful…
And with that thought, she once again started her rounds into eternity.
It was sometime later (months? weeks? She hadn’t visited a dream in ages and she wasn’t good at keeping count in her head. Also, the more appearances she made and interacted with people, the more they’d become confused and start messing the ‘real life’ time. Which sucked. Give her a newspaper any day.) that she found her second Important Dreamer.
She’d been following the blue all around the globe lately. She’d held still for an embarrassingly long time, afraid of losing sight of Steve, and now she had to catch up a lot on her job.
And there it was, this magnificent thing.
She’d seen a lot of important dreams fly all over the expanse that was Dreamland (or any other term you might refer to it as), Streams so beautiful and so thick they weaved an impressive texture and swept over other threads in their handsome glow, but she’d never interacted with them on a first-person basis.
Well, she had with Steve, but he’d gone MIA since that day and she hadn’t met his streak since. Maybe he’d moved somewhere? Geographic location was important for dreams.
This stream was, however, thick and red. She’d usually avoid the red, but this one had a fascinating nuance that didn’t evoke any red light dream she did not want to be a part of.
It was beautiful. Not as overly and encompassingly and overwhelmingly good as Steve’s had been, but it felt amazing and important all the same.
She wanted to see them.
But it was probably not the right time, as the war zone flared again in warning. Yeah okay, got you, I’m coming.
As she turned towards the front, ready to shine and soothe their souls for a tiny bit, as much as she could, she turned mournfully towards the red dream. She prodded a bit at it, and red sparkles and swans poured out of it. A little girl, how pretty! She cooed.
Time is money, Darcy, get back to work!
Yet, she kept an eye on the red webbing and its beautiful flow, because this kind of dreamers was always destined for great things. She loved that about humans. A single individual could change so much, everything could be different in the blink of an eye.
She wondered what kind of person this little girl would grow up to be. Something amazing, she just knew it.
But for now, panic and fear called her. Yay .
She flicked her tail swiftly and moved slowly across the Ocean that was people’s conscious.
And there, straight in the middle of it, she saw the golden that was Steve. Oh no . They’d sent someone as tiny and frail as Steve to war? What were they thinking ! She needed to get him out of there… she had no idea how, but he was going to die under enemy fire and she was never going to see him again.
But she didn’t get half a chance to, because much like last time, something huge knocked her off balance, and she was launched into someone else’s dream.
“Barnes; James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038.”
Was it a dream? Maybe. The pain was very real. So maybe it was not a dream. Or maybe he was hallucinating the whole thing. This seemed very possible, as well.
How long had he been saying the same exact words, he didn’t know.
But stopping seemed like a stupid ass decision, even if he didn’t know why either.
Some balding man had been all over his face one minute ago, and then pain, for an eternity. Maybe it wasn’t one minute? He’d closed his eyes for a second, but maybe he hadn’t.
“ Oh God, not again, if there’s something above don’t do it, don’t doooo iiiit… Shit!”
Something plump crashed into him. On the back of his head. Maybe.
He tried to focus his eyes, but didn’t manage to see anything.
And then he heard it, a faint coughing.
“Thanks for nothing, asshole !” the ‘something’ cried indignantly. And then turned to him. “Ah, I’m sorry? I didn’t mean to crash into your dream. It was a... Stingray? I think? It looked like a Stingray but I’m not really sure what they might have been, dreams are weird, and I really need to get out of here because they might still be out there and Oh my Quetzal what’s happened to you! ” It was a cat. Or a fox. It looked like a weird combination of the two, maybe their secret love child. With a unicorn. He didn’t know how to explain the horn, otherwise.
He blinked rapidly. He was either dreaming, or gone mad. He knew what he was putting his money on.
The cat got a bit closer and sniffed him thoroughly. “Okay, no, this is your doing, not mine. Can’t smell you.” And then showed a row of tiny teeth “Hi! Who might you be?”
“Barnes; James Buchanan; Sergeant; 32557038,” he replied dutifully.
The cat’s eyes widened a fraction and then filled with understanding. “You’re a prisoner. You’re in so much pain because they’re torturing you.” She? seemed extremely angry about it.
He really wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to get angry on his behalf, he was surely going to die soon by the way the pain was escalating again.
Whatever this was faded, and the madman was in front of him again.
Where was the cat?
The scientist’s brows furrowed, had he said it out loud?
‘Don’t say anything, Barnes, James Buchanan,’ urged a voice from the back of his head. It was hers.
Am I dreaming? This time the scientist didn’t blink, he probably didn’t say it.
‘Yes, kind of. I can’t hear you very well. But you have to be, if I can see you at all. Hold on Barnes, James Buchanan, I’m sure it’s going to be fine…’ the voice tried to soothe him.
Bucky .
‘What?’
My name’s… Bucky…
‘Bucky? Bucky?!’
“Bucky!”
…Steve?
Incoherent people were the worst dreamers of all times. It was like trying Divination by looking through mud instead of clearwater. Or an old radio suffering from so much static. But it was enough for Darcy to follow ‘Bucky’ in his rush for freedom.
And apparently, it was scrawny Steve to pull him out. She couldn’t see clearly, but she would recognize his voice anywhere.
She did, however, get a good look at someone’s very red very skull-like face. Huh. She wondered if that was even possible to pull off with her abilities. Maybe it was. Nice party trick anyway.
But the more time passed, the more James’s mind seemed to clear, and the less she could read him.
He was safe anyway, for now. And she had a bigger fish to fry. Literally.
She patted his head awkwardly with her paw, and swam off.
She didn’t turn to see his head swivelling off in her direction.
The huge thing was nowhere to be seen.
Are you kidding me? It must have been… four thousand feet, I can’t have lost it! She thought desperately.
But there was no trace of the giant stingray that had crashed her into Barnes, James Buchanan's dream.
She sighed. By now who knew where it was going. Probably to haunt someone’s dreams. Hopefully, it wasn’t a threatening individual because she had no idea how to fight or confront something remotely that big.
Yeah, not going there .
She did, however, try to keep an eye on the ex-prisoner or war, just in case he slipped back into unconsciousness. It was easier to get an actual update from there instead of waiting for someone to sleep and dream what she needed to know.
She waited for hours .
But in the end, the gentle blue that was Barnes, James Buchanan, started to spread through the expanse of the oniric world.
“Are you alright?” she asked immediately, dropping headlong into the ground.
‘Bucky’ blinked rapidly. “You’re the weird cat from my dream. Am I dreaming again?”
“Ah, yes, you are, but that’s not the point,” she waved her tail impatiently. “I asked you if you’re okay. You were pretty beaten up last time I saw you….when was that again?”
He watched her for fifteen beats before coming to himself “Uh, yeah I’m good… Two weeks ago?”
Two... “ Two weeks ? Huh. Time flies when you’re on the other side...”
Bucky frowned. “What other side?”
“Oh, no no don’t worry… I’m not dead, I hope, my body is still somewhere in the Crystal Hills… do they still call them like that?”
“...I frankly have no idea.”
She nodded. “Yeah, they’re tiny. Where are you from, again?”
He smiled “Brooklyn. And what’s your name? Or should I call you weird cat?”
“Uhm, that’s like… the other side of the continent… and I’m not a cat. I’m Darcy, the Great Carbuncle… or something similar I have no idea what they call me nowadays.”
“Darcy your real name?” he asked incredulously.
Darcy shrugged with her tiny shoulders. “Eh, I picked it some time ago, it’s nice, it stuck. I mean, it’s a real name as much as the name my parents gave me in the Empire was, and I used that one a long time.”
“How old are you anyway?”
She frowned. “What year is this?”
“1943.”
“Oh. I’m Seven-hundred-ish then.”
If Barnes, James Buchanan, had been drinking, she’d been sprayed with liquid just about now.
His eyes bugged out and his mouth dropped open.
Then he shook his head, laughed and said: “Cool.”
And okay, maybe he wasn’t completely mad.
“So… what was that flying car you were driving some time ago?”
His laughter tripled in volume.
War was ugly, but Steve and Bucky were safe, and Darcy was content to watch from afar.
They didn’t always dream, but that was fine. No human dreamt every single night.
Something changed, however, when her world started to tremble.
What... What’s happening?!
And out of dreams poured Mares, Bakus, a couple mermaids and even the giant Stingray, terrified.
Everything glowed blue.
And then, there was nothing.
Darcy didn’t know for how long her Opal refused to work, but she could feel the scraping of the stone on her arms and her ears, and she hadn’t felt that in at least four hundred years.
She’d been pushed away from the Dream World and was back into her stone prison.
But when it finally sparked to life, and she was transported back to the oniric world, she could hardly recognize it.
Gone were the streams and the expanse of colors.
In its place was a giant pool as dark as night, in which a translucent stingray swam aimlessly.
Where were the dreams? It was impossible for them to have disappeared like this. She wanted to cry. What had happened to her world?
She wandered, lost, for what seemed like an eternity. She could no longer see dreams, what was she even doing there?
The giant fish had stopped basking in the water, and was now peeking to look at her.
She felt a sudden, inexplicable need to be angry at it. Only the fact that it was the size of a small continent stopped her. It actually had to get farther away to put her into focus.
This was so unfair. She’d just carved a nice niche for herself, and now she was all alone, with a huge fish that could probably eat her in a second.
But the thing had as much fault as she had, and it was unfair to lash out at another innocent captive of that weird universe.
“Sorry.” She lowered her ears sadly. Her tail lowered, as well.
The opal gave a sizzling noise and stopped working.
This time, the irritation was ten times bigger. She was not going back to being stone. She was going to get this thing working if it killed her. She tensed all of her muscles up to her bushy tail and forced all of her focus into her tiny stone. Her back itched and her tail hurt, yet she didn’t stop.
But it wasn’t the opal to activate, this time. Her obsidian sparked to attention instead, its black light pouring all over her body. Her eyes could see light again and from the lake, dreams poured back in.
They encompassed everything again, colorful and joyous and terrible and scary and lovely and amazing.
She’d missed them.
How could she not have seen it before? The lake had always been there, and so had the stingray. They were dream as much as the others and as much as she was.
She fought the urge to hug something, she didn’t need catapulting into the unknown now.
Her tail thumped a few times and she was back into the makeshift sky, her gem shining like the sun.
Being back was awesome, but also, kind of disappointing.
Steve and Bucky were nowhere to be seen, and she really hoped nothing had happened to them.
Darcy also had no idea of how much time had actually passed since she’d last seen them. It could have been days, or months, years even. Stone didn’t have the best of time discerning abilities. Not at all.
But there was no trace of the golden aura that was her first friend, nor her other friend’s blue, and she’d looked. For she didn’t know how long.
She still entered people’s dreams, because she was bored, and still fought against monsters (and was very thankful the Stingray was friendly, because that one she wasn’t touching).
One day, though, she finally noticed something familiar.
It was the red stream she’d noticed that time. The little girl ! She thought excitedly. She’d recognize that shade of red anywhere.
She usually would have hesitated more to enter important dreams, but she was so alone and she hadn’t talked to anyone since Bucky and Steve!
Darcy launched herself into the stream happily.
She promptly regretted the decision.
She couldn’t actually choke to death, but by the Quetzal, this mind was poisoned from inside out. Much like with the Mare, this place was polluted and terrifying. This couldn’t possibly be a child’s mind, how much time had passed?
She approached cautiously the centre of the dream, her gem at the ready.
But it wasn’t a Mare. It wasn’t a monster either.
At the centre of the girl’s mind, was a young woman with empty eyes. Her red hair almost curtained her face, weren’t for the fact that she had some bobby pins that held it loosely back, failing spectacularly at any attempt to look professional.
She also had pointe shoes, but they looked lacerated and utterly destroyed, leaving her feet in a terrible state.
The woman didn’t seem to notice either of it.
What was wrong with her?
“Hello?” Darcy hesitantly extended a hand towards her. The woman snapped, and in three seconds Darcy was on her back, the woman’s thigh trying to choke her. It was… extremely unpleasant, if not completely pointless on her behalf, not that she knew it. But while she couldn’t actually asphyxiate in someone’s mind, that didn’t mean that she didn’t actually feel it. And yep, she wouldn’t say she was panicking, but her gem flashed and the woman was thrown back a little.
“Okay…” Darcy started slower. The woman didn’t leave her crouched position. Darcy sat down. “This is so awkward.”
She took a deep breath, and tried again. “Hello? Who are you?”
The girl didn’t move, but her lips started to repeat a mantra that sounded extremely close to what Barnes, James Buchanan, had spouted at her during their first meeting. “I am one of 28 young Ballerinas with the Bolshoi…”
Gah , she gagged in her mind, they were getting nowhere with this!
In response, her newly awakened obsidian sparked a bit. She did an actual double take at that. Are you kidding me? Mind control? She wanted to laugh, but probably that would provoke the woman again.
“I… frankly I had no idea they were doing the mind control shit anymore, just… just so you know. It was something hardly done in my times too, you know? With all the weird possession, but we usually liked to leave souls alone, they can be bitches later…” She was rambling, her brain trying to come up with a solution. And only one was coming to her. The black stone was now a vibrating heavy weight on her wrist. Come on Darcy, the thing worked on you by sheer stroke of luck… what are the actual chances it’ll work on her too? She really really itched to help this girl, but would that really work?
“Don’t knock it ‘till you tried it,” she sighed, and scooted a bit further back.
She fiddled with her stone bracelet a bit, until she could comfortably take the obsidian pendant in her hand, and focused. The girl didn’t move a muscle, but her eyes never left her either.
And at first, nothing changed. Nothing was working on the stupid, thick mist of acid and putrid smell.
But then, colors started to slowly seep back into the girl’s eyes, and she sneezed a few times.
Was this working?
The excitement made her almost lose her footing and progress, but she held strong and in the end, the woman’s eyes were lucid and clear again.
“Hi!” she waved hesitantly.
The girl with the red hair startled. She looked at her hands, finally noticed her feet, and then looked back at her.
She made a half aborted gesture of salute back. “Hi…?”
To Darcy’s immense pleasure, Natalia was an exceptionally regular dreamer.
She would be silly to say out loud that the young woman dreamed every night , but she dreamed a lot more than Steve ever had in the years she’d known him. Which meant she could poke her head inside Natalia’s a lot more frequently.
The Russian ballerina slash spy was too old a soul for her young body, any kind of trust in other people shattered beyond recognition and with probably no hope of salvation. It made Darcy’s old heart squeeze a bit. Oh, she’d seen it plenty of times, between child soldiers, beaten up kids, hungry people. The world was hardly perfect, she wasn’t stupid, but it always made her cry and despair a bit.
This was not something she could fix with a magic wand (or maybe a magic wand could, what did she know about magic wands anyway), and she had no idea where to start.
But the girl was also good company, if a bit cold and reserved.
She didn’t believe a lick of what Darcy tried to tell her, that she was real but haunting dreams and yes it was her job and of course she’d always be around, but gamely didn’t push for information and, after some prodding (more than Darcy ever liked to be reminded of), offered some of her own.
For starters, she could always fill her in on the date and the current happenings, which was brilliant, because there was no way she’d have found that out with such accuracy.
And so she learnt about what had happened in the real world, about the Valkyrie and Captain America, about the cold war and the mess that the world had become.
And it gnawed at her.
If Natalia was bothered by her uncomplimentary commentary of the day’s news, she never showed it. Instead, she kept giving her the probably most edited recount of history ever, because some of the stuff she was telling the carbuncle about could not possibly be true.
She was good, however, and Darcy could honestly not always discern when she was being truthful or just pulling her tails.
The shapeshifter decided it was high time to look for information elsewhere for some things, because it just wasn’t possible that people had invented a magical serum that kept you young forever. Or that a giant like Russia was now at war with the United States of America but without fighting. Gah, the lengths she went for her people .
There was a girl infiltrating her dreams, every night.
Natalia wasn’t exactly certain of how she knew, but she did. And the girl behaved like it was business like normal.
She had a vague recollection of attacking her once, but she couldn’t be certain it ‘really’ happened or not. The young woman had been wary of her at the beginning though, this seemed to support the theory she had.
The spy had no idea if this was something her chemical-addled mind had cooked up while she’d been put under serum, but she’d never seen more clearly than since she’d started receiving these ‘visits’.
It was like the curtain of fog and haze Red Room had put on her had been snatched away, and she could finally feel again.
They’d pay for what they’d done to her, mark her words. All of them.
But for now, she listened to the girl’s prattle about dreams and stingrays, and found herself doubting of her brain’s ability to concoct something so difficult and articulate for a single dream. Also because she had no idea what a stingray was, or at least she hadn’t had until the girl, ‘Darcy’, had explained it to her.
The fact that the dream haunter spoke casually about just about anything ( I was so bored out there, there’s only so many cat dreams you can visit before starting to crave catnip, and that’s no fun ) was, however, a breath of fresh air. She dreaded the day she found out it’d been her brain playing her, or worse, someone else.
When she woke up, no one gave her even an inkling of impression of suspecting what happened during the night, and she’d been allowed slightly longer missions lately. Since she failed to escape with Yakov, they’d kept her on a tight leash, lest she run away with the last drops of the good serum.
As far as she knew, no one suspected the accurate mind wipe and brainwashing she’d been victim to had been lifted or broken in any way, and she intended to keep it that way.
For now, she’d bide her time and enjoy the last refuge her mind provided.
“Oh! Oh! I have an idea!” said Darcy out of the blue, startling her.
“...What?” she asked cautiously. The last time the self-proclaimed Carbuncle (which was not a cat, apparently) had had an ‘idea’, she’d been chased by a giant worm.
“We could totally feed swans!”
And as her brain processed just how much ‘feeding swans’ could go wrong, her dream became just that.
For Swan’s sake...
It was by following Natalia’s red pattern, that She who looks at the Sun noticed just how far she’d come from her body. Natalia travelled all over the world, and she’d never been that far.
She had no idea of where she was, but she was certain it was ‘far’, because there was no dream she could recognize. Okay, colors were all pretty similar, but the interior and dreamers were total unknowns.
It was by crossing the borders of the oniric world that she noticed it.
A faint, golden glow insulated and isolated from anything else.
Steve! Her tails thumped twice. Her friend was alive! That was awesome!
She glanced at Natalia’s streak that was slowly disappearing as the woman was roused from her sleep, and then zoomed into Steve’s direction.
Cold, my oh my this is Cold! She shivered, hard. Her fur puffed up and thickened like it had never done before, not that she’d needed it in the real world, but this was ridiculous.
Everything here was cold. The ground was cold, the air was ‘I kill you’ cold and there was nothing but Ice all around.
Oh, and there was also a blue halo of death hanging around, judging by the very real smell. It didn’t smell like anything she’d ever encountered, but it didn’t fill her with joy.
“Steve?” she called hesitantly. “Are you in here?”
Silence met her.
“Steve!” she called, and called again and again.
“Who is that?” A voice called in the distance.
“ Stevie! ” she cheered.
It was him! Scrawny Steve in his too big pants and shirt. “I missed you!” She didn’t hug him only because being cantaloupe high didn’t allow for much hugging power, despite Steve’s mini size.
He smiled at her. “Darcy!” He seemed genuinely happy to see her. Well, she was happy too.
“You have no idea how long I’ve waited for you and James to come back, but you were never dreaming!” she pouted at him, “and Steve, we’re in 1965! It’s been like… 20 years!”
His eyes, which had lowered sadly at the mention of James, and yes this did scare her a lot , whipped at her in alarm. “20 years?!”
She nodded, and he cursed. A lot. Continuously and colorfully. He had started pacing somewhere between curses. “...Steve?”
He took a deep breath, and turned his eyes to her. “I thought I was going to die.”
“...Say what?”
And yeah, maybe she should have seen that coming , because of course, it would be Steve the one to drop himself into the Ocean with a time bomb of energy in a suicide mission. She honestly didn’t know what to do with him.
“And Bucky is dead, Darcy, and I’m here trapped in ice somewhere… It should have been me.”
And her heart broke for him, right there. Bucky was dead . How… She’d be strong, crying now would hardly be productive. “Oh, Steve… don’t say that. It… Sometimes, things just happen, and you can’t do anything about it. It’s… it’s not like punching Nazis or… I don’t know, standing up for what’s right, which you should always do. Tragedies, they do happen, and it’s terrible. You have to forgive yourself, and move on, Steve.”
He shook his head at that. “In ice.”
She huffed a bit. “I’m sure they’re still looking for you, Steve. They will find you .”
“At least one of us is optimistic…”
“Well, I have to. I’m still stone somewhere in America, I’ll have you know!” she grumbled.
His lips twitched upwards. “So, two tails?”
“...Well, I’m glad you asked! In fact…”
Darcy had almost no conception of time, and of course, neither did Steve.
The only one who could consistently give her a proper timeline was Natalia, but even she had started popping around all over the oniric world, like a crazy whack-a-mole she’d seen once in a dream.
And when she did spawn somewhere close to where Darcy was at the moment (which usually hovered near Steve or where there was a bigger concentration of dreamers), she was getting more and more closed off. Something big was bothering her, but she wouldn’t tell and the carbuncle knew better than to press. The girl had few pleasures in life as it was.
Another creature who did not care one bit about time, was the Stingray at the bottom of it all. The creature had never left the water since that day where everyone had scrambled madly all over (and yep, no one spoke about that ever, even between the few of them that actually spoke), and frankly? Darcy had no idea why she was thinking of the giant fish at the moment; she had just finished squabbling with a mermaid, she was wet, dirty and yep, that was fish glue in her fur. Eww . It was hardly the time to engage something big enough to make you feel tiny and insignificant.
She should just find a nice, beautiful relaxing green streak, maybe a kid’s one, or a dog’s, and just call it a day.
But her mind kept going back to the lake ‘downstairs’(?). Should she go? Nah…
She tried to clean herself, which was easier said than done when it’s actually your metaphysical existence to feel extremely dirty and covered in fish parts, and really tried to put the idea out of her mind. She failed rather spectacularly, and with a sigh decided to see just what the fish was doing. She’d just check on it real quick and then call it. Yep.
She descended slowly. Well, the fish was still in the water. It was fine. Okay, job done.
But as she made to get back to the streaks, here it was.
A jolly, dancing purple streak, ricocheting over the others. What a bizarre behaviour!
She watched it zoom all around and found her ears following the movement as well, lowering and twitching according to where it moved. She… She hadn’t done something so childish since, well since her first period in this world, well before her first encounter with the Mare, but yeah, maybe she could... just this once .
She ended up jumping and chasing the streak for what looked like hours , engaged in a solo game of tag that would have no winners. Well, technically , as she poked it a bit with her paw and feathers poured lazily out, I win. And she entered the dream laughing.
When she landed, she was still giggling. And furry. Her laughter stopped abruptly as she realized just what creature she’d been turned into. Oh the indignity, she was a dog?!
She turned around and around until she felt dizzy, but yep, she was definitely a dog. From the fuzzy ears to the sparkly collar. Oh, how glad she was no one from her old brethren could actually see her like that. In more than five hundred years, she’d always thought goldfish or ladybug had been the most humiliating, but nope. This topped it.
She had half a mind to leave the dream, because nothing warranted a wagging tail, but then the lights started, and yeah maybe she’d stop around for a bit.
It was a circus. And it was huge.
There were jugglers and fire eaters, trapeze artists and even the big animals like cats and elephants.
In the centre of the Circus Tent, sitting right on the border of the stage, was the only kid properly on focus compared to the rest of the faceless crowd. He was scruffy and small, and could only be sevenish? Eight years old was probably pushing it.
“...Hi?” she said, and was pleased to find that yes, despite the unpleasant exterior she was still able to talk. Her tail wagged. She hated it a bit more.
The kid whipped his head to her, fell down into the stage and the lion passed straight through him.
Don’t laugh, Itotia, don’t laugh...
“Don’t laugh at me!” the kid cried at her when it was clear that she’d failed at that, too.
“I… I’m not laughing at you! Okay no, I was lying, sorry, I was totally laughing at you. I’m sorry, kid,” she told him, trying very hard to seem contrite.
He nodded at her, but then realized she was a dog and that apparently made his day. “You’re a talking dog! ” he breathed out, awed. Ah, it was the talking part that got him.
“I’m not a dog,” she pouted. “I’m the Great Carbuncle, protector of dreams… or whatever they call me. But I’m not a dog!”
The kid frowned adorably. “You look like a dog.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Well, of course, you wanted a dog, ” she sighed. “This is your dream, kid, you get to choose. But believe me, if I were any more real and we met face to face, you’d see how much not a dog I am.”
“I’m not a kid! I’m Clint, and me and Barney are joining a circus!” And he slapped his hands on his mouth, as if he’d spilled such a big secret. Poor kid, in his head he probably had.
“Ah, that’s what all of this is, then!” She made a big show of being properly impressed, and Clint swelled up with pride. “Your dream is to join a circus when you grow up, that’s great!”
“No no no no! We’re joining it now!” he corrected her very promptly.
This threw her a bit. She confessed she didn’t actually focus on society and costumes while visiting people’s dreams, but she assumed eight years old kids weren’t supposed to run off with a circus, right? School was still a thing last she checked. Natalia hadn’t been snatched by those monsters (and she still had no idea of what they’d done to her!) until she was eleven, right?
“Ah… is… is it really what you’re going to do?”
“Yes!” He was very… certain. “Barney’s got ‘t all planned out! We’re gon’ to live this place and join the best circus ever!”
“Well, then! I’m sure you’ll do great!” she smiled tentatively. This kid was for real. She almost dreaded peeking in his mind.
He nodded swiftly but then fell silent and his smile slipped a bit.
“....Are you scared?”
“No!” he said too quickly. “....A bit.”
Darcy nodded and sat beside him. “Everything is going to be fine, Clint. I’ll be there.”
And yeah, maybe it was.
“Darcy, Darcy!” Seriously, this kid was adorable.
Clint had this springy, wild energy around him that made you smile without even trying.
And he was doing better. Darcy had her reservations about a growing kid of eleven being raised in a circus and so far away from schools and normal standards, but he was just so… happier.
He was fed, and his mind was full of joy and hope. At least he and Barney were safe from their dad, Darcy supposed.
It wasn’t that bad, after all.
“Hey, kid!” she wagged her (alas!) dog tail.
Clint smiled toothily at her. “Guess what?”
“What!” she played along.
“I’ve got my own trick now!” he was extremely excited and proud about it, too.
“Oh really, what’s it?” please don’t say dog tamer, I will scream.
“I’m The Amazing Hawkeye, world’s greatest marksman! That’s the name I’m gonna use, and I even got a bow, see?”
Oh yes, she could see. Her headaches had just tripled, hadn’t they?
Clint Francis Barton became ‘The Amazing Hawkeye’ in an impressively short time.
And now Darcy had to juggle her time between Natalia, who’d done something terrible because her streak had become murky and tainted and she could hardly reach her without getting some impressive blisters, Steve, who was still in ice and losing his patience over this so bad he was starting to ask how to reach the oniric ocean ( You can’t Steve, you can’t) , Clint, who’d become a marksman for the circus and was having trouble with his brother, and actually doing some Dream Cleaning .
She’d be a hypocrite to say that she didn’t play favourites, especially since she’d been following her friends all over the globe in hopes of checking on them all the time and actually talking to them. But with her recent, but not very recent, obsession with few people she’d actually let other creatures roam free and uncontrolled in people’s dreams. And yes, while no soul had been harmed so far, she couldn’t really risk someone suffering because she couldn’t be bothered to make a couple statements.
It was a very pretty mess.
She was just lucky people only dreamt ‘seriously’ for about a few seconds and hardly remembered anything about what they’d just dreamt about (and the fact that these four people had never once forgotten about her hadn’t escaped her notice. She often wondered just what made them so special, apart from being the closest thing she had to friends, of course).
It was one of these days, as she proceeded to knock some sense into a Nightmare trying to stampede all over what looked like a kiddy’s orphanage or school trip in a very terrible place, that she noticed a blue streak passing by her tail.
She tensed. James?
She threw another glare to the Nightmare, who cowered and slunk(?) away scared at the sight of her very real very sparkling Central Stone, and followed.
James James James James!
But before she could reach for the blue that she was sure it would be Bucky, the streak seemed to freeze and die before her eyes.
She froze.
James ?
Her ears tensed upwards, and she inhaled through her nose to catch a scent, a sound, anything.
The streak was gone.
Her ears flattened on her head.
And then, she noticed she’d gotten much farther away than usual.
She sighed deeply and made her way back to where she’d come from. Go figure.
When she came back, Clint’s purple streak lay in shambles.
“Clint? Clint?!”
Darcy was wading frantically through the last vestiges of the happy, jumping dream that had been Clint’s signature since she’d met him years ago.
She’d seen dreams become like this, as the dreamers’ life waned and they approached the Mirror side and Mermaids carried them away.
It was just… why Clint? Why now? Wouldn’t she even be able to say goodbye?
She couldn’t see him anywhere.
“Clint! Clint where are you?!” she cried desperately.
Belatedly she noticed today she wasn’t a dog, but her cantaloupe sized self. She flashed her gem with urgency, just in case. It glowed and bathed everything in light, but Clint was nowhere to be found.
She looked and looked for what was probably an eternity.
But the dream wasn’t disappearing, and so she kept searching.
When she found him, he was so still he resembled a statue.
“Clint!” she rushed to him, panicked, but relieved at the same time.
He didn’t respond.
“...Clint?”
“...Where were you?” he asked, in a rough, pained voice that didn’t sound like him at all.
She stiffened, taken aback. “What?”
“‘I’m here, I’ll be with you’ you said, well guess who wasn’t there when I needed her?!” he shouted back.
“...What? Clint, what?” She didn’t even stop the surge, this time, and immediately peeked into the boy’s mind. She was horrified. The young man had been stabbed, every bone in his body broken and left to die in a ditch somewhere. “Clint…” She breathed out, tears pooling in her eyes. “Oh Clint, what happened?! ”
“ Out of my head !” he snarled back, furious. She jumped, and the link was broken.
“Clint, you need help, you… you’ll die!” Her paw went immediately to her gem, but Clint wasn’t listening.
“Well , I would never have guessed ! And who’s going to help me? You? ‘The Great Carbuncle’ that couldn’t be bothered to be there for one of her ‘best friends’? You left me. You weren’t there and this is what happened. All powerful cat nothing, how would you even have saved me from that? Huh? Stuck in a world where everything is beautiful and butterflies!”
“Now, that’s unfair, Clint!” she cried back, hurt.
“AND HOW IS THAT FAIR?!” he roared at her. “You live in a cushy universe where you can just snap a finger and leave for brighter skies and greener pastures. You’ve never had to fight for food only to end in a ditch somewhere!” He took a deep breath, but his eyes weren’t warmer, at all. “I thought you could do anything… I suppose it was just a kid’s wishful thinking.” And he made to leave.
Darcy scrambled to get in front of him again, before it was too late, but the Gem on her forehead, angry at the outburst of the teenager, refused to work.
She wailed a bit on the inside. If she didn’t do anything, her friend would die, just like James, and she couldn’t do anything about it! She stared at Clint’s back, and then glanced speculatively at her tails.
Desperate times, Darcy, desperate times… She thought fiercely. She ran straight into his back, bit him on the shoulder not to lose her grip, and forced the Fluorite on her left tail onto his neck.
The teenager spasmed and tried to shake her off, but her will was stronger and her grip held true. The Fluorite shimmered her purplish green light, and suddenly he was greenish too.
He woke up soon after.
I just hope it works, she thought desperately as she was thrown out of the dream and tiredness launched her to the bottom of the dream world.
Clint Barton woke up, and something was definitely wrong with it.
He blinked blearily at the sunlight pouring from the sky.
Was he supposed to feel like this? He moved his head and groaned in discomfort.
Wait.
Shouldn’t he be in excruciating pain because of something… Barney, he realized, and scrambled to his feet to assess the damage.
He… remembered it being much worse than that? He had some black marks, and probably sported a shiner and yep, this was a knife wound that was thankfully superficial, but he didn’t feel any broken bone in his body.
In fact, compared to what he should feel, he was feeling great.
He slowly reached for his bag, which had been left by the dumpster after the altercation with his brother ( his own brother! ), and was displeased to find it almost empty.
No wallet, no cash, nothing. He patted his right shoe, and was relieved to find that the money that he’d hid was still there. Okay, not great, but not that bad either.
The circus was surely gone by now, his bow in tow; he’d have to find money the old-fashioned way. And a job.
Possibly both.
He checked himself as well as he could in the dimmed lights of the dirty alley, but apart from a couple of creaking sounds of popping joints, there was nothing on his body to indicate the recent fight that had left him on the brink of death.
Recent? Maybe that’s the point… He thought unconvincingly. Maybe more time than he thought had passed and he’d survived against all odds by staying in a completely undisturbed coma for days. He shook his head: not possible, absolutely not possible.
And then the vague memory of being bitten on the shoulder came to him, and all at once he remembered Darcy the Carbuncle, the harsh words he’d thrown at her in anger and her absolute panic and hurt. And guilt rose in his chest as he remembered the green glow that had enveloped him.
He hadn’t meant to really say those things. They seemed like a good idea at the time, but maybe he wasn’t thinking at all… He… He didn’t mean those things at all! Darcy had been always with him since he left his house and that monster of a father, she’d cheered him on as he became a carnie, despite her reluctance at the idea of him ditching school to become a performer, and here he was, judging her for something she couldn’t control and screaming at her for no other reason than needing to vent.
He sighed.
What a mess he’d done, and it was all his fault.
Fine, he sighed again, Great job, Barton. Now you’re going to fix this shit up.
But that night, and the next, and the next, and so on, the Great Carbuncle didn’t visit his dreams.
‘...You live in a cushy universe… Never had to fight for food only to die in a ditch… ‘
The words Clint had thrown at her stung. They stung a lot .
It… it wasn’t the truth, right? Right! She’d been fighting for humans and their dreams for centuries! She’d fought tooth and nail for their minds. Right! How ungrateful, she’d protected him, protected them all, for ages!
...He didn’t really mean that, did he?
She watched as the streaks passed her by, joyous and carefree. She didn’t really feel like entering any of them right now.
She found herself at the bottom of the oniric world, her tails dipping in the water of the lake.
Was she really a self-appointed hero wannabe with no real reason to exist? Okay, Clint hadn’t actually used those words, but…
She wasn’t useless! She… wasn’t she?
Her first thought was to go and find Steve, because Natalia was so far away and she had no intention of getting blistered for it, but then thought better of it. What if it’s real?
Had she really abandoned her friend? She hadn’t! She… she’d just gotten distracted for a bit, and it wasn’t like she could have done any- … She stopped abruptly her train of thoughts.
She couldn’t have done anything to save him from his dreams .
She was horrified. Clint was right! She was useless!
Had she been able to actually vomit, she felt this was the perfect moment.
How could she be helpful to her friends, if she could just stay and watch as they got beat down, dropped feet into ice with no one to look for them, or got lost into their mind so bad she could hardly find them! What a horrible friend she was!
Another wave of phantom nausea assaulted her, and she could feel the Stingray’s disappointed stare ( No, I’m not going to touch your water, promise ) at the sound she made as her mind tried to process the sensation of ‘bile’ without actually having it inside the body. Dry heaving in the metaphysical was a thing, from now on.
But what else could she do? She was stuck in a stone forever, all because of her not caring.
...Not caring? ...for humans? A small part of her complained petulantly.
But… she did care for them! Maybe not all of them, but she cared for Steve, she cared for Natalia and Clint and yes, before he died she’d cared a lot for Bucky. She did care! She loved them !
And suddenly, she knew what she had to do.
Maybe.
If such a thing existed, if such a thing was possible, she’d try her damned best.
Her Opal blinked again, and she was gone.
(She could have sworn the Stingray had shot her an approving glance, but she had probably just imagined it…)
Where was he? … Who was he?...
It’s cold…
Waking up was… underwhelming.
Not really, actually. The first rush of blood in her body was a revelation . If fifty years or so ago the blue light had woken her by force, and panic had overwhelmed her to a degree she’d fallen back into unconsciousness as soon as her stone had started working again, this time it was determination that roused her. And this kind of rush was heady and wonderful.
Then came the beating of the heart, and the feel of fur, and the tiny claws under her plush paws, and the tingling as her limbs recovered from a 400 years-long hibernation. She stubbornly decided the jumpscare of 1945 would never be mentioned again, nor considered an actual waking up.
And then, came the realization that she couldn’t see a damn thing, and that the rocks that were hardly close to her when she’d put herself to sleep were now surrounding her. So much so she was basically cocooned.
Oh Quetzal, she’d been wrapped in sediments like a damn stalagmite.
Well, she supposed it was, if not fair, at least to be expected. No, she didn’t expect it, but logically speaking it was plausible. Humid cave in the middle of nowhere with a lot of silence and a lot of rocks and water, of course, she’d become stuck like a limpet. Gah.
This was so not supposed to happen.
Her Gem flashed in her panic, and all it accomplished was that the bright light reflected by the shell made her see stars. Okay ouch. Ow, ow, ow. Not doing that again .
She bit back a frustrated groan.
Her paws came up as much as they could from her balled up position to scratch at the rock, unsuccessfully. Of course, they weren’t claws born to maul, let alone pulverize rock. She was just a tiny creature… Unless she shifted into something bigger!
The sudden elation, however, made her hesitate. Would it even be safe? This body hadn’t Shifted in over four hundreds years, she hadn’t fed and now that she thought about it? She really had to pee, like yesterday.
In the end, there was no other choice than attempt a Shifting, despite the hunger and the discomfort. She focused, her tails tensed, her gem became the rich red color that forecast a Shifting, and a miniaturized cougar was in her place. And it was so uncomfortable . The transformation was the biggest fail in the history of failed transformations, something a five years old Carbuncle would be ashamed to admit to. Darcy deflated so quick to her normal form she felt like disappearing. She breathed in through her nose. This made her stiffen further. Was… was the air supply going to become a problem?
The thought made her panic, hard. She had to get out, now.
She focused again, this time instead of focusing on the beauty of the form she wanted to assume, she concentrated on size. She needed big, and she needed it now.
She tensed, her gem colored, her tails stiffened.
The rock cracked a bit, then creaked, and then, with a smashing sound, a huge ball of fur made it explode without any kind of grace.
Forget grace and any sort of dignity, Darcy thought harshly, fighting off memories of her people’s teaching about poise and beauty, see if grace and beauty save you from rocks.
She shrunk back, exhausted. Okay, this was bad.
Her Central Stone shone brightly again, and illuminated the cave she was in. Musty and damp didn’t really do it justice. It was… kind of disgusting. And creepy.
The smell was terrible, she didn’t remember it being this bad, and she was getting wet just by breathing, and this was disgraceful .
There was water on her left, she could smell it. She followed her nose to a pool, and lapped some.
And in the pool, lazing about, were fat, soft, and viscous salamanders.
Her stomach rumbled. Oh no, she was so not going to do that. She was not getting into the water and she was not eating strange amphibians she didn’t even know were edible.
Her stomach rumbled again, harder. Her ears flattened on her head.
The salamanders noticed, and scrambled back. The thought of actually losing dinner won, and she scampered into the pool.
Ten minutes later, she was disgusted, the things had been gross and probably poisonous, seeing as the Amethyst on her tail was flickering like mad and making her sweat bullets, but she was also weirdly full and sated.
The cave didn’t look any brighter or more appealing on a full stomach.
Darcy was sure her fur would never ever be shiny again, with how much wet, drippy and gooey this place was. The sticky substances that were at the bottom of the pool clung stubbornly on her paws, and she was not licking that (she’d tried, it was terrible).
However, with her Gem shining and bathing the interior of the cave in yellow light, she could now make out the several globs of stone that were her people, presumably. How many were they? Three hundred? Four? She vaguely recalled Texcoco having roughly 24.000 units when the Conquistadores had come, so maybe it wasn’t a stretch to think they’d been four hundreds of so.
She didn’t really know.
She idly wondered if her parents were in there as well, probably yes.
Not that she’d seen much of them, actually. Carbuncles weren’t extraordinarily maternal between themselves, not at all, the Shapeshifting making it difficult for them to have clear directions with blood relatives to the point they looked for affection and companionship in other breeds, species and societies instead of building their own. She found herself very detached from their situation, and not at all sympathetic.
This made her feel a bit guilty too, because, after four hundreds years of caring for humans and absorbing their great love for live beings, she still couldn’t empathize with her people. She felt a bit like a failure in that department, but after five days of trying to wake someone, anyone, up, she had to concede the point that no amount of external poking and prodding would wake a hibernating rock if it didn’t want to.
By then, Itotia had also concluded that in no way she’d eat another amphibian. Her poison stone, the Amethyst, had been seriously overworked in these days.
It was time she left this place and went looking for her friends.
A few minutes out of the cave, she was already missing the wetness and the humid cold.
The desert sucked.
And a few hours later, she was just. so done. with sand.
She couldn’t wait to be out of the desert.
‘Out of the desert’ didn’t happen until three weeks later. Of course, the moment she lamented the size of the Mojave desert that didn’t really compare to the Atlas she’d consulted ages ago, she also realized she could have just Shifted in something more practical, like a bird, and just flown out of there.
She found herself on the outskirts of what could only compare to a very small village, for there were only a handful of houses. She crawled softly as close as she could without being noticed, and yep, that was it.
The first thought that flitted her mind, once she saw the humans in the real world after so long, was tall! Mexica had never been that big and imposing, ever. These people were at… at least five to six inches taller! This could not be the average, she hadn’t shrunk, how had she not noticed she was that much smaller in the dream world? Perception must be so different in people’s brains , she thought disgruntled.
The second, was pale .
These people weren’t Mexica, they were white and tall much like the Conquistadores were.
Darcy sighed. It was to be expected, 400 years was a long time.
She observed them for two days straight, brushing on her old teachings and training on how to blend in an approach the unsuspecting, but so far she was coming up mostly empty.
While for a Pochteca was extremely easy to blend in, just show your tattoos and no one will ask questions, humans of the XXth century, for that was how she should refer to time as from now on (and it was so stupid, Reeds would always be her go to), used an obscene amount of written documents she had no way to get her paws on.
For now, it was best to bide her time and Shift into something less conspicuous than a girl with no paper trail that just popped out of nowhere.
A loud bark made her start, jump from where she was perched and fall into an open dumpster.
Ooooooooooh She shook in fury as a peel of something rotten slid on her back. She poked her head from the dumpster to stare at the stupid beast.
The dog was massive.
Unfortunately for him, Darcy could be bigger.
But the dog had given her an idea, after all. Humans were required to carry documents, dogs or pets weren’t so strictly regulated.
If that night the alley on the back of the only diner had another scruffy dog checking for food, no one noticed complained about it. In fact, the number of people discreetly dumping crumbs or leftover was staggering. Darcy had no idea what they saw in the stupid creatures, dogs would never be a favourite of hers, but she would never complain about this. Ever.
The time spent as a dog allowed Darcy to make an incredible amount of discoveries without pinging anyone’s weird-o-meter.
For example, that her tongue, while skittish in her base form to the point of not being able to eat fruit, could allow for much much more leeway on that, and surviving on leftover hamburgers and half rotten cauliflowers was suddenly a thing.
Also, people were absolute suckers for cute animals and friendly creatures. Itotia had never had the chance of being petted or hugged much, being a travelling merchant and a sort of double agent for the Emperor, but ‘Spotty’ had no such compunction and was the young kids’ love whenever they passed by the diner.
The diner owners, as well, were extremely lenient with her and as long as she behaved herself, didn’t cause a ruckus, allowed the patrons to play with her a bit and was all in all a sociable creature. They even put a big blanket on the back of the building, so she could wrap in it.
But it was clear, after a few months, that staying in the tiny cluster of houses and in dog form would not get her anywhere close to her friends.
And so, one night, Darcy wiggled out of her alley as a beetle, and hitched a ride on someone’s car, directed who knew where.
If smallish cougar had been madly uncomfortable, with its limbs all tangled in the wrong places and the muscles that pressed and pushed in a totally different way than they should have, half-assed beetle was just as bad .
The first thing I do , was all she was thinking about, is getting a damn encyclopedia of Nature or something .
But the transformation had done its job, and she’d been able to travel from the coast of the Mojave Desert to Hillerton, Nevada, without any kind of problem.
By then, the idea of spending months as a dog or hitching a ride to somewhere else didn’t sound appealing at all. Keeping a form wasn’t hard, as long as she recharged regularly with food and sleep, but animals had an impressive number of limitations that humans did not have. Also, since most of the time she’d spent in the real world had been in human form, it was probably the best kind of Shifting she could do and maintain at the present time.
However, justifying the sudden appearance of a girl that didn’t exist until 48 hours earlier was just screaming ‘look at me’ to just about anyone. No, it couldn’t be done.
She sighed and resigned herself to a long, long stay in the realm of Doghood… The pains she went for her people .
It was the smoke that got her attention first.
Then, the smell of death.
She’d been toying with the idea of going to the Dream World that night, but boy, was she glad she hadn’t done that. Watching this from the metaphysical must be atrocious , she thought as she raced through the streets of Hillerton, trying to get to safety.
It had been a terribly hot summer, and it wasn’t rare that fires started spontaneously.
This time, however, the wind had picked up suddenly and the flames had reached the outskirts extremely quickly. So quickly, that the fire brigade hadn’t managed to put them down in time.
The city was burning .
Then came the shouts.
And she found herself changing her directions abruptly, without even thinking about it, towards the screams.
The fire brigade was already there, desperately trying to quench the flames that were eating the building from the inside out.
Darcy fought a wave of nausea. It was 1989, how was it possible that such a big building was burning so fast and so… quickly , with no hope of salvation?
Her eyes fell on the building’s name and her stomach dropped.
St. Lucy of Providence Orphanage.
It was an orphanage. A house full of children was burning and her rage was mounting extremely quickly, too.
For as much ignorant as she was on the matters of humans, because while in the oniric world orphans had been a notion she was familiar with, it had been a reality far away, she was vaguely aware that some sort of regulation was in place so that such a thing would not happen . She’d interacted with children. They didn’t dream often of their real life, preferring to instead live wondrous adventures.
She listened as the men gathered around complained that the funds for renovating the orphanage had just come and works were about to start, and stifled the urge to snarl or bark too loudly, lest they notice the stray dog that was her.
When the fire brigade announced that they couldn’t hear any more voices coming from the inside, she suddenly felt completely detached. It was just like the war, just like Clint, it was watching the events unfold and feel useless, useless and obsolete in her bones. And she couldn’t do anything special, her powers didn’t include resistance or super strength, her Central Stone didn’t care for fire, for it didn’t have a soul to be judged, or a body to be healed.
And so, the mutt launched herself into the fire under the protests of the firemen and the shouts of the passersby. Surely there must be a survivor, at least one!
The stench of smoke made her cough, and immediately her Amethyst gem, sitting under her tail, started cleansing her body from the smoke. Of course, the longer she stayed, the less the tiny thing could actually keep up.
She didn’t have much time, and she was hardly fireproof unless she suddenly became rocks, and that wasn’t helpful. She fought her instincts to ball up and transform.
The rooms were devastated, the fire was too hot, everything smelled and she was starting to believe nothing had lived for real.
Her gem flashed in search of a soul to latch on. Nothing.
Oh Quetzal, they were really dead.
And then, she felt it. A weak, coughing sound coming from upstairs.
She raced upstairs as fast as she could, and there it was, a little kid under a cupboard.
She reached for him, but she didn’t have hands or opposable thumbs to actually open the thing.
And so she shifted, fast, but again, an adult was too big to actually reach the cupboard.
She groaned. Come on, come on!
She focused on the kid, his terrified face and took in all the details.
This time, she shifted into a tiny enough kid she could reach for the cupboard. She pulled and pushed and yes! the kid was out and she had her tiny, chubby arms around him.
In that moment, the firemen managed to penetrate the flaming building.
“WE’RE HERE!” she shouted from the top of her lungs, the smoke burning her throat and making her cough. The kid had burrowed his face into her shoulder and she tried to press his clothes closer to cover him up.
She grabbed a blanket and put it on herself.
“Help!!” she called again.
She didn’t think anything could get as close as the fear she’d felt in her first encounter with the Mare, but as far as feelings went, the moment the fire department pulled her and the kid out of the building and wrapped them in blankets, the euphoria and satisfaction of having saved at least one, was pretty close.
Fires on Hillerton
The recent outbreak of fires has now evolved into a full-blown emergency for the tiny town of Hillerton, Nevada.
In the date of yesterday, August 3rd, the fires reached the poor districts of the southern part of the city and destroyed a massive amount of properties. Police is investigating the--
-- Orphanage of St Lucy, where the matrons and most of the kids were caught in the blaze, asleep and unaware. Only two children were found alive, one of them in critical conditions…--
“What’s your name, dearie?”
“...Darthy,” she mumbled, her sore throat spelling it wrong twice before getting something half as useful. “Dar-cy,” she spelt out, again.
She knew it was stupid to use the same name she’d used in her dreams, but call her sentimental, she couldn’t let go of the only thing that would allow Steve, Natalia or Clint (if he ever wanted to speak to her again) to recognize her.
The woman at the hospital made understanding, ‘cute’ noises and wrote it down a clipboard.
They’d been over this at least four times. Your name, do you remember your surname, your age? Do you know what happened? And the answers were always Darcy, I don’t know, I don’t know, I really really don’t know .
“How about you rest for a bit, Darcy, hm?” the woman sighed and tried to look as calm and kind as possible. She only managed to look terse, but Darcy smiled shyly and got under the covers anyway.
“There’s a good girl, honey, good night,” the woman smiled a bit more this time.
The covers were clean, and well, it was a nice change than the solid ground she’d gotten used to sleeping on, and the room as quiet.
That night, after almost two years of almost not sleeping, Darcy dreamt again.
The Dream World was exactly how she remembered it.
She swam a bit around, wondering if the fact that she was here meant she wasn’t actually dreaming or if her streak was around somewhere. The mere thought made no sense, so she discarded it.
What she wanted, was to look for her friends.
She scouted the surrounding area, but there was no trace of Clint.
She did, however, find Steve’s golden aura, shining brightly from where he’d fallen in 1945. After over forty years, his dreams had not abated or given in to darker thoughts. This always made her smile.
“Steve!!”
“Darcy!” he smiled. “Maybe time has started slipping me by again, but I must say it’s long time no see…!”
“Yes!” she chipped, excited. She was pleased to notice she was back to her normal looks, as well. “It’s been so long since I visited here! I’m so relieved the dream world is going well on its own…”
His eyes sharpened immediately. “on its own? Darcy…”
“Yes! It’s what I wanted to talk to you about!” she nodded vigorously. “Steve, I’m out! I’m in the real world!”
His smile became sad, if still sincere. “That’s great, Darce…”
She felt her smile slip a bit. “I’m… I’m so sorry Steve…” Her ears lowered. “I don’t know how to help you…” And she really didn’t, her body was very much a child and very much under surveillance in a hospital. Besides, who would believe her anyway? Dreams weren’t an option either, people had stopped believing in Mystic Apparitions very early on.
Hopefully, Steve could hold on some more. His golden shine gave her hope.
The following months flew by exceptionally quickly, and time was still a novel concept for the carbuncle.
Social services had shipped her, ‘Miracle Child Darcy’, all over Nevada with hopes of finding her a foster family, with no luck so far. Some were nice, others were terrible, but all in all, they weren’t seriously looking for another mouth to feed.
Some were extremely interested in the large and precious hairpin she carried in her hair, and so she’d started wearing large woollen hats wherever she went now, never leaving it even inside the house ( it’s my style! ).
In the end, it was the Lewises that accepted to keep her for the foreseeable future.
The Lewis family was tiny, not rich by any means, but they were kind and gentle and not once thought of her as a burden.
Darcy was ashamed to admit she’d looked into their minds more than once, but they hadn’t let her down so far.
After a while, she could say she kind of wished carbuncles were this kind of maternal, because despite having had five different childhoods, this was really the best.
They loved her.
And she loved them back, fiercely, and as much as she loved her friends.
She hadn’t forgotten about them of course. At night, with her body safely tucked into bed and resting peacefully, she spent a lot of time with her old duties of monster-fighting and visiting Steve. Clint hadn’t appeared yet, and this made her think he’d started some weird kind of sleep schedule that let him sleep during the day, and Natalia’s aura was still extremely noxious.
She’d penetrated it once, but hadn’t found her friend anywhere before being ejected by force. Her tails still shook with displeasure at the thought.
But most importantly, she was now integrating into the new universe that was humanity ‘five hundred years later’.
No human sacrifice was good of course, vaccines were amazing, and not needing to actually hunt your food if you weren’t a dedicated rich merchant? Priceless.
Also, jewel stones were ready made and sold already cut. This had her torn. On one hand, not needing to hike all over the world to find the rock you needed was a beautiful thing, on the other, not actually conquering the gemstone would probably make it very difficult to harness. She’d never try that with a Ruby or a Sapphire, that’d just ask for trouble… but maybe a Quartz was something she could ponder for the future.
Of course, not all was well and good. The world had a lot more pollution, information was a great thing but also a great problem, and there were no flying cars yet (James would have been devastated). “Certainly,” her mom told her one day, as they exited the Supermarket. “Howard Stark will invent one sooner or later. His latest expo was amazing Darcy, Dad and I will take you to the next one, promise!” They’d been driving all over the city for the last of Christmas Shopping. It was barely mid-December, but Mom was determined to see it done it all by today ( you never know what happens Darcy, you need to be prepared with at least ten backup plans! -- Darcy understood, she hadn’t forgotten all of her training yet!). But Darcy was only half listening to the complaints of Tessa, who was trying very hard not to curse at every driver that tried to honk at her in queue.
She’d heard the name ‘Howard Stark’ from Steve and Bucky in their dreams, he was a friend of theirs! She hadn’t known he was still alive!
Maybe this was the answer!
That night, and the following ones, as she prepared for the night, she hoped she could find anything useful for her friend.
What she found instead, was a familiar blue streak, floating calmly her way.
This was-! Impossible! Her eyes widened at least three sizes.
It was the second time such a thing had happened, and the first time it hadn’t ended very well, Darcy recalled with a shiver. But maybe Bucky was here, maybe he was alive, maybe maybe…
There was only one way to find out.
Well, she now had a pretty clear idea of what snow was.
She sputtered and coughed as her tiny body was submerged in snow. It wasn’t even funny. Snow wasn’t supposed to be cold in dreams, or in figments of one’s imagination, because the brain couldn’t actually feel this kind of sensorial stimuli and successfully reproduce them during the dream. But the snow felt a lot cold, and she could smell the disgusting stink of gasoline in the distance.
This must be a memory. She thought morosely, wading through the snow ‘the traditional way’ --by feet--, and a fresh one at that .
Memories were finicky stuff. She’d been in a few already, but none of them had been this clear and detailed, it must have happened hours, if not minutes ago.
A sound of screeching tires attracted her. Oh, how she wished she’d just been sent where the memory took place instead of ‘somewhere in the vicinity’. Sometimes thought process was unbelievably stupid; it would have made much more sense to keep the whole memory in a contained, limited space instead of generating countless acres of white snowy expanse.
She saw a motorcycle speeding on the road.
She followed.
Without her Shifting powers, she had barely reached the motorcycle, when the car wreck happened.
BOOM.
One second there was a car, the other devastation.
The man in the motorcycle let the cycle screech on the road and ran away, but it wasn’t that Darcy cared about.
A man came out of the shadows, and no matter how different he dressed, or how his hair was different, she’d recognize it anywhere (He was alive! This was awesome, she couldn’t wait to tell Steve! He wasn’t alone after all!).
Apparently, so had the man behind the wheel.
‘ Sergeant Barnes?’ The man whispered.
From the car, another voice was coming out, ‘Howard?’
Sergeant Barnes didn’t flinch, and heedless of the pleas of the couple, killed them both in front of Darcy’s horrified eyes.
Bucky! NO!
James swivelled towards her direction, and she made herself tiny and small.
It didn’t really matter, of course, she wasn’t really there, but then she saw his eyes.
This wasn’t Bucky. It just couldn’t be.
The elation at finding her friend was alive was swept away with the knowledge that her friend was probably no more. There was no way this empty-eyed creature could be the Barnes, James Buchanan she’d known fifty years ago. But the dream was his, it wasn’t a copycat or some mysteriously lost twin.
Her obsidian pulsed on her tail, just like it had with Natalia. Her tails thumped and her ears flattened on her head. She wasn’t a violent creature, between fight or flight she’d always pick flight unless no other choice was there, but this was the second time one of her people had been taken from her by mind control and she was seriously getting annoyed. She bared her tiny teeth and sprayed Bucky in the obsidian’s black glow.
He blinked a few times and his vision cleared, but as he turned to her with his clear blue eyes, something happened.
It was pain.
Unbelievable pain shot through her, like being zapped by the God of Lightning himself, and James disappeared.
The cold intensified.
She ran.
That morning she woke up with terrible pains all over her body.
Her parents told her she’d had a seizure, apparently, and were taking her to the doctor straight away.
It didn’t matter anyway, the only person who she knew would know how to look for Steve, Howard Stark, was now dead, and James out of her reach.
The next few days were passed in a haze of Hospitals, despite the Christmas feel that was pouring from all over (and okay, Darcy may not really believe in Christmas, but she could appreciate the beautiful climate of peace and love it tried to convey).
Darcy’s mind had first rebelled against what she’d seen, but then accepted it and she even cried a bit.
And then debated on telling Steve or not.
Should she? He’d be devastated.
“Mum?” she said one day, surprising herself. It was probably the most important conversation she had with her mum, and she was barely six years old (seven hundred).
“Yes, dearie?” her mother smiled from the chair she was sitting on, in the doctor’s waiting room.
“If you had a friend…” Her mother was suddenly very amused and Darcy flushed. “This friend thinks a friend of his is not his friend anymore, but I know he is. However, this friend did something very bad but it wasn’t on purpose and is now in trouble for it… should I… should I tell my friend? He couldn’t help him and he’d suffer reeeeally bad if I told him?”
Her mother’s amusement slipped a bit and she frowned. “Darcy, how much trouble are we talking about here?”
My friend is being mind controlled into killing people and Captain America can’t save him because he’s in ice. “N-Nothing too serious… ‘s just… trouble,” she mumbled instead.
Her mother looked at her intensely, before nodding. “Well, it depends on how important you think this is. Is your friend going to be very angry you didn’t tell him? Would you want to know even if you couldn’t help?”
Yes. “...Yes?”
Her mother smiled. “Well, then. Your friend will feel bad, but you’ll help him and when your other friend is not in trouble anymore you can all come and play at your house, okay?”
If you only knew. Darcy smiled. “Thanks, Mom, you’re the best!!”
She really, really was.
Darcy the Carbuncle sighed loudly as she cartwheeled across the beautiful expanse that was the oniric world. The absence of gravity was always the absolute best.
Steve… hadn’t taken the news well, of course. He’d agreed to not blow a gasket while he was stuck in ice waiting, but Darcy knew how stubborn her friend was. For now, she’d look for James her way.
She sighed deeply. What a mess.
Steve was stuck, Natalia was still out of her reach, not to mention James. And Clint… well, Clint’s purple streak had never shown up again. She really feared he’d died that night in the tiny alley.
Her wandering had brought her towards what she thought was Europe, she didn’t really count her distances when floating.
As if summoned, Clint’s streak zoomed right past her.
Okay. It had been six years since she’d last seen Clint and apparently he was alive, and well enough to have a clean, if a bit battered, purple streak on him.
Should you even bother him? A voice in her head snarked, the last time it didn’t end so well.
Well… Yes. She needed to explain, and then to understand.
She had lost one and maybe two friends, she wasn’t losing a third.
Darcy had gotten used to the feeling of changing during dreams -- everyone dreamed differently and had almost total agency in their own space-- but it was still extremely discombobulating to become another creature entirely. The body was stretched or shrank and sometimes weird appendages like horns or wings sprouted out of nowhere, depending on the actual factual knowledge the dreamer had on the creature’s anatomy. However, and this was the main difference from a Shifting, it was done completely outside of her control or will, and yep… It was fine, but man, she was that damn golden retriever again and she was so sick of it.
“You!” she screamed at the top of her canine, bigger lungs, “How dare you make me a dog again! Show up, Clinton Francis Barton, and face your just punishment!”
There was a gasping sound, followed by what should have been a crash (and this would be a first), and then the very surprised face of an adult Clint Barton was right in her personal space.
“It’s you,” he breathed. “And I can hear you!”
She looked at him strangely. “Wha-HEY!”
She was suddenly being squeezed by a strong set of arms. Her fur was raised all over in patches as he hugged her. “Clint, okay, okay, it’s… Clint, I’m not a dog, stop scratching my ears!” It was awkward and not at all pleasant, but dog her thought otherwise and wagged her tail harder. This was humiliating.
Fine, she huffed, she was a lying liar who lied and she’d missed that.
“I thought you’d never want to speak to me again,” he pulled back a bit and scratched the back of his head. “I’m sorry for what I said the last time,” he said with that embarrassed smile of his that still showed his dimple.
“I thought the same. You were so right…” Darcy disentangled herself.
“No, I wasn’t!” he shook his head.
“You were. I was useless, and it was stupid of me to think I--”
“You saved my life.”
“What?” What?
And so followed the adventures of the Amazing Hawkeye from the day he left the Circus.
Darcy was so happy to have her friend back and whole that she almost let the ‘I kill people for a living while playing spy’ slide. Of course, the moment was over in half a second.
“What! You… Please tell me you’re not still wearing that garish purple thing,” she said pleadingly.
His shit-eating grin was enough.
“Okay, no, forget it. Let me tell you how it works, kid-”
“Darcy, I’m 21 now! I’m no longer a kid!” Clint half pouted, then remembered he was supposed to be an adult.
She looked at him pityingly. “Are you 300 yet? No? Then you’re a kid, kid.”
He didn’t quite sulk, but it was a close thing.
Her laughter turned into a bark that made her blush to the root of her fur.
This time, he laughed.
Life got back into a steady rhythm that involved Clint and Darcy’s tentatives to have him blend in a bit more ( You sound just like Phil, seriously, like Phil! She’d have to thank this Phil, whoever he was) and Steve and Darcy’s tentatives not to make him go stir crazy. She was absolutely failing.
Before she knew, however, the world was breaching the new Millennium and everyone was extremely excited about it.
Everything felt a little more charged and festive, and for the occasion Darcy broke her beloved piggy bank and bought herself a tiny unpolished Emerald from a tiny, shady pawn shop, to use just in case.
It wasn’t a Ruby, but it’d do in a pinch.
She was just about ready to celebrate her newest addition, when she saw Natalia’s pure, undiluted red shining in the distance.
Her heart skipped a beat, but then sank in the deepest pits of the Ocean that was the expanse of the dream world.
Clint was there too. And he was just a beat from her. Darcy wasn’t stupid, she’d seen what Natalia, her poor Natalia, had done during these long years, and despite not being able to directly contact her, she’d kept a close eye from afar.
She didn’t want Clint and Natalia to meet, not until she was sure it was safe for both of them.
Two killers in such a close distance could only mean one thing.
And she had no intentions to pick a side.
Clint’s streak disappeared, he’d woken up. Blast!
She cursed, loudly. Okay, plan B. She sighed. Please, Natalia, don’t burn me this time…
She was worth more.
The thought was still completely alien to her. The fact that she was a person, her own person, and not a machine or a gun at someone’s disposal.
Oh, she’d gotten rid of her puppeteers long, long ago, but her expertise and her being pointed to someone’s head over and over had been her only marketable skill for years.
She knew only some of what had happened before the last few years, the tortures and manipulations fading one onto the other until only a huge, nonsensical blob stayed in place of solid memories.
She had very few clear memories of her time in Red Room, when the experimental mind control treatment failed.
She did remember a girl.
A loquacious, tiny, blonde girl.
In her place stood a talking, tiny, fluffy cat and now, it was staring at her.
“Natalia?” the cat fluffed its tail and cocked its head.
She didn’t expect the reaction she had to her name. Her skin crawled and her spine stiffened. She suddenly felt the need to vomit.
“I’m not Natalia,” she snapped, disgusted and maybe a bit hurt.
The cat recoiled, startled. “...Are you going to attack me again? Because the last time wasn’t pleasant, I tell you…”
Nata...lia? frowned. Was she going to attack a cat? Had she attacked a cat before? No, she’d never met a talking cat before.
But her eyes dropped to her gemmed tails, and in those, she recognized the gems in the girl’s bracelet. Could the cat and the girl be the same person?
“...Darcy?”
The weird cat’s ears perked up and its face contorted in what was certainly a smile “You remember me! How nice! I missed you!” And she started prattling about how nice it was not to be eaten to death by acid dreams, on how she hadn’t changed at all and other inconsequential things.
If this weird cat wasn’t a figment of her imagination, she was the most carefree creature she’d met, right beside ‘Clint’ (was she calling him Clint now? God, what had become of the Black Widow!).
“Clint?” The cat’s eyes zeroed on her and she felt put on the spot.
The Black Widow’s mask slid into place. If the cat was real, this was probably a test to see if she’d give up her captor. And maybe previously she’d have done it, sell her partner and live in freedom until another problem arose, but she really wanted to believe she was worth more.
So she said nothing.
The ‘Darcy’ wasn’t discouraged, and went on as if nothing had happened. “...Because if you knew him, or at least some crazy guy called Clint that should or should not be close to where you’re sleeping now, that’d save me a lot of chit-chats… just sayin’...”
This time, it was she who was interested in what the creature had to say. “You know Clint.”
“Ah, so you do call him Clint,” she replied in kind, and yeah, she’d walked right into that one.
“...Maybe.”
The creature smiled brilliantly. “Then, please tell him that Phil would be super worried, because I just know he’s done something terribly risky if he’s talking to you... Last I checked, you were on opposite sides of the field.” And with that, waved clumsily with a paw and literally flew away like carried with the wind.
She woke up in the safe house, Hawkeye hovering close to the closed window.
He nodded at her. “Feeling good?”
She nodded back, warily. “Someone in my dreams just told me... Phil?... is worried and you should stop doing risky things.”
The look he gave her was comical to the point of hysterics, but then he locked the window tightly, dropped on the chair and smiled. “I knew I liked you for a reason! So, tell me everything, what else did Darcy say?”
Natalia and Clint together and tolerating each other was great, wonderful news.
She trusted Clint and his ability during the job, but she trusted Natalia to keep him on the straight and narrow when outside of it, too. Also, the two of them having each other’s backs was brilliant. It was like watching the birth of something special (which was not a rock out of a rock, that wasn’t fancy).
And in fact, six months after having met them, Clint explained to her in very excited tones about the birth of STRIKE Team Delta, of which he was very proud.
Darcy couldn’t blame him, she was proud too. Her friends were making waves in the world, and this time it was the good kind of waves.
She stretched slowly on her bed. Since Clint and Nat (which was now the official name until another one was given, since the girl startled so much at hearing her full one) had moved to Europe to do whatever they did, she had taken to nap a lot during the day, in order to keep an eye on them as soon as they dozed off.
Of course, she didn’t need to be sleeping to activate her stone, but napping was much more justifiable than ‘staring into nothingness for hours to no end’.
This probably gave her the title of ‘sleepiest teenager of the world’ by default, if we didn’t count sloths or cats, which was fine by her.
Her parents weren’t bothered either, so.
Tessa Lewis (neé Jackson) knew from the bottom of her heart she would be a good mother.
She’d wanted, all of her life, to be just that: a good mother with three or four kids, and for this goal she worked her ass off.
Then she met Dave, and he too wanted a big family. They fell in love, got married, and then got double, triple jobs to get the house they wanted.
But then, of course, life happened and kids weren’t in the cards anymore.
And so they’d looked at other ways, from fostering to adoption.
And after a while, Darcy had come along.
The moment she’d seen the kid, Tessa had known this was it.
And Darcy was a blessing, she was nice and spontaneous and yet sometimes she seemed more mature than she was supposed to. Tessa had watched as she grew from the little girl with the big woollen hats to cover up a very fancy pin that belonged to her since forever to a young woman ready to change the world. She’d do it too.
“OH MY GOD!”
Tessa froze.
Darcy was planted in front of the TV, at 2 am in the morning. It wasn’t… weird, per say; Darcy had weirder habits than sleeping during the day, and she systematically devoured international news. She wanted to keep updated on everything, from fashion patterns to the socio-political situation between Nepal and Wakanda (which frankly baffled everyone and no one really cared about?).
Tessa sighed, ready to send her daughter to bed, bracing herself for a slight confrontation (I’m eighteen!) , but the horror struck face she was sporting made her hesitate.
“Uhm Darcy? What’s wrong?”
Her daughter’s eyes were brimming with tears and she was gesticulating wildly to the screen.
‘BREAKING: Attack on Sokovia, bombs level the central part of Novi Grad’.
Oh, God.
The images weren’t very clear, but the city looked devastated. Ruins and shambles were still smoking while people cried and tried to reach for their loved ones.
Tessa sat down silently and watched for another three hours as the coverage became more and more stilted and the news less and less clear by the minute.
The morning after, there was no trace of the Sokovia episode in any of the news or the Newspaper.
Darcy’s mood worsened through the whole day, so much that the next day Dave had to drive her from school she was shaking so much.
She wasn’t unused to her daughter’s moodiness and inexplicable questions (sometimes she wondered just how wild Darcy’s fantasies ran, because some questions were absurd), but when that day the CNN published an official retraction, apologizing for the alarming news that indeed was a misprint, she didn’t expect the sharp reaction that followed.
“How dare they!” Darcy seethed on her spot.
“Darcy…” she started, but no words came out. Maybe it really had been nothing to worry about (Liar, her conscious screamed, you saw the images, and the panic in people’s eyes).
“No ‘Darcy’,” she said slowly. “Sokovia burned right under our very eyes, and now they’re telling us that the lives of those people are ‘nothing to worry about’? Who fired the missiles? Are they sending relief forces? What is NATO going to do?”
There were no answers of course.
Tessa surprised herself looking for information on Sokovia at work the next day, but found nothing but a nice travel guide.
Darcy hadn’t come down at all the whole day, ‘sleeping it off’.
The next time she saw her, she had a large, angry lettered package, with what seemed a ton of tape to keep it together, she was dropping off at the post.
Tessa looked at Dave and he glanced back. Yep, not walking into that one.
How dare they leave a country to fend for itself after a bombing and then chalk it as a misinterpretation of the facts. How.
Darcy was mad.
Scratch that. She was beyond mad, she’d passed mad after the first few days. Now instead, she had reached furious, and then the smoldering heat had become a raging inferno of ‘mad’.
The first thing she’d done that night had been checking on Nat and Clint, and after that, she’d launched into the expanse that was her domain.
Finding Sokovia turned out to be not as easy as she thought it’d be, it was that tiny.
There was rage, fear, but also a lot of resignation.
What attracted her, however, was a white-hot flare of a child panicking.
She dropped gently into the dream, trying not to scare the kid further.
Well, this I hadn’t seen before.
She stared at the two kids, they stared back at her.
She’d seen twins before and had waded through their dreams, sometimes they even shared space in that, but she’d never actually witnessed a completely shared dream. And in fraternal twins at that! How… fascinating!
She smiled and noticed she was human looking, for once. It was weird. Usually, kids cast her into a more animal-looking, plushier role? No matter, the kids were terrified even in dream.
She crouched until she was level with their eyes, and then sat down clumsily.
“Hi!” she said gently. “I’m Darcy, and who are you?”
The boy put himself between her and his sister, and it would have been adorable weren’t for the fact that his fear was very real to him. He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin up like a little soldier, and said: “I’m Pietro, and she’s Wanda.”
And aww, she wanted to hug them.
It soon became a regular occurrence, for Darcy, to visit Sokovia and the twins, who had apparently been trapped inside their building for three days with an unexploded bomb- What the hell-- and were now living in the streets… Good gracious.
They had taken to live under the city, or in the ruined buildings, and they looked thinner by the day.
She couldn’t do much for them, and so she taught.
She taught them how to be invisible, how to reach for good gossip and information, who to shoplift from and how to play dumb when caught. It was a smattering of skills she never had to use, being her Guild very respected and their job more nomadic than the twins’ lifestyle would ever be, but they’d probably enjoy.
And they grew… content, in part, if not happy.
What worried her, however, was the contempt they were nesting for the creator of the weapons that had taken their parents from them.
They didn’t talk about it, but the Carbuncle could feel it, festering in their mind, unreachable to her until they spoke about it. She felt powerless in this, but determined not to give up on them.
She cajoled Clint into teaching her to play the guitar (Give me hands Clint, I need to learn!) and spent a great part of her nights with them clumsily trying to pass on the knowledge. She was ashamed to admit nine years old Wanda played the guitar so much better than she did.
She snuggled closer to them and hugged hard. She was not giving up on them. Ever.
In retrospect, Darcy should have expected it.
Her short-term plan had been ‘get documents - find friends - live happily (ever after?)’.
She hadn’t really counted on secret spy organizations, world travel, friends blocked in ice (and how did you explain that to your other friends?), but most of all, hadn’t expected her growing attachment to her family.
Carbuncles, and she’d never tire of saying this, were not maternal creatures. They had some weird superiority pack instinct that made them always choose their people instead of others, but didn’t form any attachment to parents, to siblings or to spawns. Well, Darcy supposed, she could probably distinguish her biological family? Maybe? They shifted a lot of forms… It had never been a concern for her.
But now she cared, and that was making things difficult.
Her parents were pushing to send her to college.
Darcy had no intention of studying anymore, after over 500 years of pure academics and never moving her body. She was tired of notions that had come to her already, and had no interest in science.
She’d wanted to work a bit, get a car, and then finally get going. She’d waited sixteen years already!
But leaving would mean disappoint, if not downright alienate those she now considered her parents, who’d always been there for her. Ugh, peopling sucked.
In the end, it was decided she’d enroll to Culver to further her academic pursuit in… Ancient Languages. She felt sick at the thought, but Clint would get a kick out of it, at least (so would Natasha, now that she thought about it).
Her parents were inordinately proud of her, and despite being over 700 years old, Darcy felt the blush creeping at her cheeks as she left.
The pains she went for her people.
With five people to actively and routinely follow, Darcy had very little time to herself in the dream world.
So it came as a surprise when that cold day of March 2007, as Spring had yet to come from hibernation (fuck no, another 5 minutes, Winter!), she found herself completely alone.
Not even Steve was dreaming. Which hopefully was not a bad thing.
So, she spent the time in the oniric world with the Stingray at the bottom. It wasn’t much company, but it still let her vent and complain and talk about nonsense. Maybe it didn’t care, but it had led her to Barnes that first time, so maybe it was coincidence, maybe it wasn’t.
“And so I was thinking of switching majors? I don’t know, Languages is cool and all, but nothing challenging. Which is ridiculous of course, but I feel like I’m not making enough difference in the wo- You’re not really listening, are you?” she sighed, monologuing was frustrating.
But yes, she had been thinking of switching her majors for a while. The college experience had become really tiring really quickly. There was nothing in her major that was helpful to the building of a better society for her people (despite getting a kick out of translating effortlessly in front of a speechless professor who was an A++ jerk). Or even close to achieving her goal, at that. She should probably go back to the real world to look for new student loans or scholarships, she could probably swing something that way.
The only good thing that had come from college, was the learning experience that had been Clarissa Smith, her roommate.
Clarissa loved the college life and was determined to make the most of it, and this usually involved an ungodly amount of alcohol. It was fine, of course, but her roommate was not a nice drunk. In fact, she became very outspoken and more than once she’d broken her arm by hitting a frat boy or two. As a result, to show her support as well, Darcy learnt how to share her power with gems of the same kind of those she’d developed an affinity to. This kickstarted her budding career as a bracelet maker, apparently, because this was the only way she could actually get her friend to wear the damn Fluorites. They weren’t much, but at least Clare’s arm would heal properly. Of course, she was pretty proud of this achievement. The stingray didn’t indeed care one bit about what she was mumbling about. It kept swimming and looking at her from far away.
Sometimes it’d look upwards, and then back at her. After the tenth time, it was abundantly clear that its patience with her was over, and she should just go on and be productive for the day.
“For a mute fish of ethereal consistency, you sure know how to pass your message across, you big grump,” she scoffed. The fish was probably shrugging at her, too.
But it really got what it wanted. Darcy stood up, fluffed her tails a bit, and moved straight into the first colorful streak she noticed.
She was a redhead. Okay, she could work with red hair, but why the heels?!
Heels were something she’d never tolerated. Okay, she looked good in those, but they didn’t allow for half the balance a good pair of flats would.
And she had a clipboard? Just where was she?
“Ah, pepper, there you are!” A man waved his hand at her from a work table behind a glass panel. Pepper? The food? Was he talking about food?
“Ah, sorry?” she looked around. “Are you talking to me?”
He turned to her and blinked rapidly. “You’re not Pepper.”
“We have a winner!” she exclaimed, raising her eyebrows.
The man turned fully to her then, removing his soldering lenses and grabbing a towel. Would there be a point in telling him to just imagine the sweat away?
“Who are you?” Was he checking her out? Oh, Quetzal.
“Look, buddy -”
“Tony.”
“Okay. Look, Tony, I could be the ancestor of your progenitors at the start of your line. Please, don’t look at me like that. And put me in flats, I can’t stand the heels.”
This rocked him back a bit. “What?”
And to Hell with the idea of keeping him in his dream. “I said, give me flats. Stop dreaming of … redhead young me with heels!” She gestured at her body, idly noticing that she was at least two inches taller than she was in real life.
It took ‘Tony’ two minutes less than Steve to understand what was happening, but to be fair, she wasn’t even trying to keep Tony in the realms of sleep. The dream shimmered into nothingness and the mist was back.
“Huh.” She watched as the man’s eyes widened and took in all of the little details of his dream space. “So this is a dream?” he touched experimentally the golden walls, and almost laughed in glee at the cloud-like texture. He looked at least ten years younger.
“Yes, your dream, to be exact…” And then cleared her throat loudly and pointed at her high heels. He shrugged unapologetically and her shoes disappeared.
“Cool, thanks!” She sat on the ground, legs crossed, in front of his incredulous expression.
He recovered fast. “...So, anyway, who are you?”
“I’m Darcy, the Great Carbuncle!”
“Carbuncle?” he goggled, “as in, the mythical creature?”
“Oh! You’ve heard of me!” she said, pleased.
“Well, Jarvis used to read me a lot of silly fantasy fairy tales. Carbuncles featured in some…”
“Yeah… I’ve seen them… some of them are outrageous,” she thinned her lips.
“Oh? So you’re not a magical cat with a horn on the forehead?”
She coughed “...No, actually… That’s pretty accurate.”
“Huh,” he gaped, speechless. “So anyway, what are you doing here in my dream? Because we’re still dreaming, right?”
“You’re dreaming, I’m infesting,” she said snarkily.
“ Why would you infest my dream ?!”
“I was curious, okay?! But let’s not digress-! I’m Darcy, who are you?” and she smiled sunnily.
He stared at her suspiciously. “Are you going to take control of me if I give you my real name?”
She gaped. “...No? What the hell is this question anyway? Also, why would I admit to such a thing!?”
“Fair enough,” he shrugged. “Worth a try. I’m Tony.” And put himself in a pose that was probably meant to be easily recognizable. And so Darcy wracked her brain for all the Tonys she could have been told about. Oh. She did feel a little dumb now.
“You’re Tony Stark.”
He laughed airily. “Now who’s heard of whom?”
“Everyone who’s anyone has heard of you and your father,” she grumbled.
His smile strained.
She sighed. “What’s wrong now?” She knew that kind of polite smile.
“Wrong? Why wrong? Nothing’s wrong!”
She nodded. “Okay, no mentioning Howard, touchy subject, got it.”
“It’s- It’s not a touchy subject!” he replied a bit too quickly.
“Dude, calm down, I get it!” she shook her head. “My bio dad wasn’t great either, ‘kay? Heck, not even my bio mom now that I think about it… My parents were assholes…” Her eyes widened. She’d said that out loud for the first time. Huh. Technically, she hadn’t been a good daughter the first time around either.
“Parents huh? So you’re not generated from the wishes of pure children?”
“What?” she shuddered, “is that what they say? Nah, we’re born… it’s… it’s a bit like watching Rocks spawn, actually.”
“Rocks don’t spawn,” he replied unhelpfully.
“Not rocks, of course. Rocks do, though. Once they gain consciousness it’s all about- But don’t distract me! Let’s talk about you. What were you building before? With the soldering iron,” she added.
“Ah, well,” he sounded actually flattered at that. “As a matter of fact I’m--”
Tony Stark was a fountain of knowledge .
And snark.
Sometimes rudeness, too.
But in the end, he was a character, and most of all a good man, if a bit vain. Darcy didn’t really approve of his ‘methods’ or his lifestyle, but she was a seven hundred years old shapeshifter feline disguised as a Millennial and pretending to be interested in Languages, so who was really she to judge.
But there was no disputing he was a genius in his field.
He wasn’t an extremely patient teacher, and she’d needed to pester him a lot for actual lessons, but he was a very good sport about it. At least he didn’t threaten to give up when it was clear that she’d never be good at mechanical engineering or anything remotely similar.
They had found companionship in computers and programming though.
She’d never admit it, but she owed Tony Stark a lot of her hacking abilities. Like, all of them.
“So, can I hack into your servers now?”
He laughed. “Nice try, but no. Wait. Do you even have hands to do it?”
“Tony,” she deadpanned, “I was human looking before your founding fathers were more than… how do you call it? ‘A twinkle in your parents’ eyes?”
“Uhm.” He thought about it a bit, and meanwhile, she busied herself with fiddling with the computer again. “How old are you anyway?”
“Seven-hundred-ish? Maybe? We didn’t count them like you do. We used Reeds and Fishes.”
“Wh-What kind of culture uses Fishes as a way to count time?!” he gasped dramatically.
“Ours,” she replied simply, not looking up from the computer screen, “but then Spanish Conquistadores came and we ran for it. They destroyed the Mexica not long after.”
“Mexi- Like, Montezuma Mexica. Huh. Must have been a doozy.”
Darcy shrugged. She’d answered a lot of ‘human sacrifice’ questions during the years. “The only thing it needed was running water and the ‘net. The rest I could do without. HA! Cracked it!”
Watching his brain think of more complex stuff to have her do was a thing of beauty.
After a while, she could say that Tony Stark had become one of her people.
On the same side, she could say that she had become one of his.
Six people in her brood (seven, once she got to Barnes and beat some obsidian into him), and she loved it.
But while the others accepted her position of ‘weird authority’, and in the case of the twins --who had now begun the dreaded ‘Thirteen years old phase’-- her ‘mothering instincts’ that hadn’t been quenched one bit by the fact that they were growing up (and wasn’t that weird?), Tony kept questioning her at all given times.
“And so you… eat a gemstone and use its power?”
“What? No! You have to conquer the gem, Tony, eating has nothing to do with it!”
“But you used that Amethyst on me last time and I wasn’t hungover the next day!”
Her eyebrows raised to her very red hairline. “You were dying from alcohol poisoning, you idiot, you weren’t just drunk ! I can’t let you unsupervised one second and you tempt death. And that Amethyst I had to literally carve out of the stone I got it from. And it’s like the stupidest stone to find ever.”
His eagerness seemed to fade a bit. “I sense a story coming out?”
She sighed. “It’s nothing. Really. Stones and gems are how we used to calculate our prestige and status, right? And Amethyst was like, the lowest of low… “ He frowned but she waved him off. ”Nah. It’s okay, I’ve outgrown that. Besides, without this baby, I wouldn’t be here either,” she smiled playfully and stage-whispered. “Don’t eat poisonous salamanders, by the way, they suck hard.”
Tony’s mind had readily picked up the fact that Darcy was very much playing the human too, and he’d tried many times to find out just who she was.
“Come on, o’ Great Carbuncle! Give me a hint!”
“Nope.” She was enjoying it a little too much, maybe, but she was already being so... plain on her name. Darcy was totally an original, rare name. He was probably thinking looking for Darcy would be too obvious (Clint and Nat thought very much the same).
“Please? I’ll introduce you to JARVIS!”
“Nnnnope. And who’s Jarvis anyway?”
“Fine. See if I don’t find you!” he sulked.
She cackled.
“Say that again,” Steve sighed, loudly.
“‘Captain America: how he made the World a better place’.” And okay, maybe she laughed a bit when he groaned out loud.
“Why are you doing this again? To torture me?”
“Nah, to get a scholarship,” she shrugged. “It was that or ‘The importance of Latveria’s politics in the late seventies’, which yeeeeah, not happening, dude.”
“Why do you need a scholarship?” Steve was puzzled.
“I’ve changed majors, now I’m trying to get into poli-sci, which is much more fun than what I was studying before, which was Literature, by the way, and before that Languages. I just needed a change of pace.”
He didn’t seem satisfied with the answer, but let it go.
“So, Steve, what’s the first thing you want to share about making the world a better place?” The look he gave her was non-suffering and maybe a bit exasperated. She shrugged. “Okaaay, I’m bullshitting this.”
Culver University was a mess.
Okay, Darcy had actually gotten a full ride for the whole four years after entirely too much strife, (since her Captain America essay had been amazing, okay?), but there was no mercy at Culver for whoever wasn’t into STEM.
She’d been juggling her course load for years now, her parents supporting her from afar with food (which… yep, no one could beat her mom’s food), and now she was so close to getting her degree she could taste it.
That was the precise moment her advisor told her she needed six more science credits to graduate.
Which was bull.
She complained loudly about it with Tony that night, who was halfway from suggesting she give him her name so he could save her.
“Nice try.” She almost stuck her tongue at him mockingly.
“Wish I could help you, tiny carbuncle from Mexico, but I’m actually due for a trip to Afghanistan tomorrow.”
Yeah, she knew that, it’d been the talk of the week in the right ambients.
“Oh, congratulations on your prize, by the way!” she suddenly recalled.
“Why thank you, even if I left him to Happy for… you know… stuff. I was busy. So anyway, let’s get you these six credits...”
But she never got to apply any of the tricks Tony had taught her, for the next day, Tony had disappeared.
BREAKING: Tony Stark missing in Afghanistan after terrorist attack .
Tony Stark could count on his hands the horrible moments of his life.
Of course, there was a countless amount of episodes that ranked right on the border of it, but there were only a few that he wasn’t fully able to happily shove to the back of his mind.
Until a few weeks ago, he could have shelved ‘my parents’ deaths’ right at the top, quickly followed by ‘a magical cat whose existence I used to question told me a brainwashed fossil killed my parents’ (and that was poking a hornet's nest).
Right now, his worst moments had been reevaluated. He didn’t have a top ten anymore, per say, just a huge, anticlimactic overwhelming ball of guilt.
He thought he had the answers.
He really, really thought he’d make the world better and his father proud by following in his footsteps.
That had been the answer, right? Make him proud and keep protecting the young American people. The ‘American Way’.
And yet. It wasn’t the answer at all, apparently.
And now he was stranded who knew where, prisoner with another captive man who he had apparently wronged back in 1999 or something, he had a makeshift arc reactor on his chest (which was an improvement from the car battery, if he did say so himself) and these ‘Ten Rings’ were going to kill him and Yinsen. He kind of felt sorry for the man, who did nothing to deserve this kind of fate. He was not including himself in that, the young men he saw die beside him when his FunVee had been blown up were forever imprinted in his memory.
He didn’t sleep at night, he could hardly be forced to eat.
What the hell had become of him.
“You must sleep, Mr Stark,” called Yinsen from his cot.
Tony scoffed lightly. “As if I’d be able to sleep.”
The doctor sighed, loudly and heavily and Tony really didn’t want to dwell on that tiredness, because he wasn’t being that irrational with this, certainly. Yinsen made to open his mouth, then thought better of it, maybe, because he snapped it shut and just turned around, his eyes closed.
“...Try, Mr Stark, tomorrow is going to be another day.”
And it wasn’t guilt that made him turn off the tiny light, which made hardly a difference in the dimly lit prison they were confined into, it so so wasn’t.
Darcy was not going to give up on this.
She’d spent the better part of the first month since Tony’s disappearance scouring the oniric world, twisting and turning all over, hoping to catch the man’s distinctive color.
She couldn’t find anything.
Now, before James and Steve, this would have discouraged her greatly, because she knew what the lack of a light meant for normal people, but yet these tiny humans (they were giants compared to her tiny cantaloupe sized body) kept doing the impossible and coming back and back and back again. And Tony was not a lesser man than James and Steve. Less super juiced, maybe, but no less tenacious. He wouldn’t have gone down like this.
No, no. Tony was somewhere and he needed her help; she had to find him.
The next few days, Darcy didn’t bother getting out of bed. She slept and slept, so much her roommate actually called the ambulance on her (of course, there was nothing they could do to wake her, but they didn’t know that, yet).
The carbuncle was completely focused on her task though, and felt no need to go and check on physical her as much as she should have.
For now, she had a bigger fish to fry.
She tried probing gently with Clint and Natasha, but couldn’t very well go and ask them directly about Afghanistan. She wasn’t an asshole and had no intention of putting them in the difficult position of having to lie to your friend or betray your secret spy organization. Besides, they weren’t even close to the ‘stans’ right now, with Clint being close to New Zealand and Nat running interference somewhere in Ohio.
There was just her, and her powers.
And it would have to do.
She moved again, her tails steering her to what she assumed was East, for there was no sun to read, nor stars to navigate, but she was pretty sure she was on the right direction.
The lights of dreaming people were diminishing the more she sped along, and while it was frustrating not being able to glean from dreams where exactly she was right now, she convinced herself it could only be a good sign, because no serious terrorist would keep a prisoner (if Tony was, in fact, a prisoner, and she refused to believe he was dead) so close to civilization, right?
The little Shape-shifter huffed. Were it the real world, she'd probably have fainted from exhaustion long ago. As it was, she only felt annoyed.
After a while, though, she finally, finally felt it.
Glimmering with uncertainty, feebly latching to the dream world like a limpet, was Tony’s unmistakable energy.
Darcy didn’t even think. With swiftness, she dropped low and dive bombed in the burgundy stream of her friend’s conscious.
“Tony, Tony!”
“Tony, Tony!”
The soulless eyes of the soldier who had died while escorting him were staring into the void, the mouth agape and dripping blood. He was dead. Irrevocably dead.
And yet he heard a voice calling for him.
He supposed his mind had finally kicked it and he was finally crazy.
It had taken him months, his father would be proud. Or maybe not. Captain America would have probably lasted longer.
Or maybe it was a spirit haunting him.
“Tony! Oh my God! Tony!” What an annoyingly shrill voice his mind had.
He squeezed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. Normally, Tony Stark would never have indulged in such juvenile behaviour outside his lab, but he reasoned this was the perfect place. If one ever felt the need to. Which was not the situation there.
But the persistent noise wouldn’t stop. It just. Wouldn’t. Stop.
And then his head was hit by something big, fluffy and very alive.
“TONY! YOU’RE ALIVE! I FOUND YOU!”
The man reflexively put his hands to his face, grabbing whatever had grabbed him, and opened his eyes. Nothing. He could see only fur, which was probably the tail of whatever had just landed on his goatee.
Even opening his mouth to question the event was sure to give him a mouthful of tail.
He pawed aimlessly at the thing, that scrambled on its tiny paws until it could perch on his shoulder.
...Wait.
“...Darcy?”
The tails of the magical creature curled around his neck and the tiny head with disproportionate ears nuzzled his cheek. Then the tiny immortal noticed, stiffened and stopped. “...We’re not going to mention that ever, right?”
Hadn’t this been such a serious situation he would probably have laughed. As it was, he was shaken enough by the recent happenings and realizing this was a dream did little to relieve him of his guilt. If anything, he was idly disappointed this wasn’t over.
“What are you doing here?!” he wondered instead.
“I was looking for you, of course!” Was she? “I’ve been looking for months, Tony! You’ve been gone so long!” Months?!
“But let’s not dwell on this, Tony! Where are you???” she suddenly demanded. “Give me coordinates, geographical stuff I can use, anything that can help us locate you! I’ll send an anonymous letter, something. Just… anything at all!” she begged.
How he wished he could. “I… don’t know.”
“What.”
“They didn’t exactly give us a Tour, o’ Great Carbuncle,” he rebuked acerbically.
Her ears flattened on her head. “Sorry.”
Tony sighed, slightly guilty. It wasn’t her fault, after all. “It’s not your fault I’m the special guest in a terrorist facility with a shrapnel in my chest that could kill me at any moment.”
“YOU’RE WHAT?!”
Her voice was so high he’d lost an eardrum in real life. “It’s no big deal, for now. I stabilized it with something. Don’t worry.”
“You just told me you have a hole in your chest and you expect me not to worry?!” Okay no, this-
“That’s not accurate.” There was a magnet in his chest, after all.
Of course, his friend wasn’t appeased by the rough explanation, demanding instead he tell her a way to understand better the situation and hopefully help him.
“-Don’t care how complicated this shit is, Tony. I’m not giving up on you. No.”
Heh. She’d be the first apart from Pepper. He felt a very real pang in his heart.
“Hey, Darcy,” he started. He wasn’t sure he wanted to actually ask her.
“What is it?” She had probably felt the change in his voice, because she was suddenly very attentive.
“Have-” Wow, not even in dreams he could formulate his thoughts coherently today. “Have they stopped looking for me?”
Darcy blinked. “Of course they haven’t!” she responded immediately. “Virginia Potts gave another press conference for Obadiah Stane just the other day, they’re still searching over Afghanistan.” That… well, no, he actually had no idea what to think.
“Oh. Nice. Yeah, cool…” He suddenly felt the need to clear his throat, even if it wasn’t parched at all.
“...Tony,” the Carbuncle stared at him, and then lowered her eyes. “Is there anything at all I can do for you? Anything. Please, there must be something. I can’t find you on my own.”
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said. The fact that he wasn’t hit with anything after he’d actually called the oldest creature he knew ‘kid’ was a testament to how much she must worry about him. His mind flew to Pepper, poor Pepper left all alone to fend for herself. And Obie. And JARVIS. And the bots.
He rationally knew this situation was not entirely his fault, still, he felt guilty.
“Actually… could you please do me a favour?”
Darcy’s eyes snapped to him quickly. “Anything.”
Tessa Lewis had never, in her life, thought it would end like this.
If it were ending, that is.
When Clarissa had called her from the hospital, she’d expected something crazy had finally happened. Darcy had been so well behaved all of her life, never drinking, never staying out late… Apart from the impromptu daily naps or the almost nocturnal lifestyle she showed at random intervals, there was nothing that made her think-
According to the doctors, though, these ‘naps’ should have been a warning bell long, long ago.
Exam after exam came back negative, medical personnel would pelt her with questions, but Darcy wouldn’t wake up.
So she answered as best as she could and every night went to bed in a hotel room she’d rented for the month.
It was shy of twelve days now and her daughter wouldn’t wake up.
“It’s remarkable,” one of the interns was saying, shaking his head just out of Tessa’s comfort zone. He was probably talking to his colleagues because he wasn’t turning to meet her eyes. “Her brain scans say she’s just sleeping, ya know? But nothing is waking her up.”
“Wish I could sleep that well. If I get five hours it’s a miracle,” huffed another.
She made a noise in the back of her throat and the medical students turned to her, only to blush and disperse a second later.
She sighed.
The last ten days she’d gotten too caught up in her anxiety and she’d started rambling after two hours at anyone really, interns included, but this time she’d come prepared. She had a book and knitting. She was ready to spend the whole day with her daughter and had loads to do.
Of course, the first five minutes in Darcy’s body spasmed, she gasped and jumped up in a fluid motion that managed to dislodge the IV she was attached to.
“I GOT IT. I NEED A COMPUTER!” she screamed, triumphant. Then she noticed her surroundings, her mother and blinked. “Mom? Did I miss an important date, or something?”
And it was such a Darcy thing to say, Tessa couldn’t stop crying.
Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts was having the worst time of her life, lately.
Since Tony Stark had waltzed into her life, ‘rollercoaster’ just couldn’t cut it anymore.
At first, it was the impossible life he lead, the horrible habits, the countless women, the attitude.
And yet she couldn’t really stop loving the idiot. Platonically, of course .
Then he’d stopped drinking. Or at least, getting caught hungover or in various states of undress while drunk. According to JARVIS, a friend was helping him with alcohol.
Then started the sleepless nights where he’d spend all the time in his labs with Tracking devices she couldn’t understand. Again, according to JARVIS, Tony was trying to trick and track his friend into ‘revealing his location’ by sending objects to random post offices in the US and calculating how much it’d take them to get to it and how long it took them to lose the tail he’d put on them. Judging by the frustrated sounds every time this scenario played, again and again, Tony’s friend was good.
Pepper was not one to pry, of course, she could be extremely professional, but as Tony’s friend, she felt she needed to be kept in the loop.
She removed her shoes as she muttered a tired ‘Hello’ to JARVIS, entering Tony’s Malibu house. She’d probably indulge in a glass of wine tonight. Since the Jericho test drive, she’d done that a lot more often.
She couldn’t find a fault in this though.
Tony was gone.
He wasn’t dead, for certain. He was much too stubborn to die. But…
But.
Had she been less of a lady even in private she would have dropped on the sofa. She instead sat down very primly and pulled out her StarkPad, the bots making low background noises.
She couldn’t look for Tony, but she could keep everything else a hundred percent functional until he came home. She owed him that much.
U hiccupped on the stairs. Even the bots couldn’t be cheerful without their ‘dad’.
Oh man. She sniffled. She said she wouldn’t sniffle or cry today.
“Miss Potts,” JARVIS interrupted her musings. That was unusual, but not unwelcome.
“Yes, JARVIS?” she smiled tiredly.
“Someone is overriding some of my protocols.”
It was like ice was poured down her back with no warning. “What?” she gasped softly.
This was not good. Not good, not good at all.
“They’re trying to rewrite some of my code,” he repeated in an uncharacteristically tense voice. For an AI, that is.
“Do I need to call security?”
“I do not think it necessary,” he sounded unsure. “They’re not touching the security features. It.” The AI stopped. “It feels like Sir.”
And then the hologram screen in Tony’s living room activated and she was suddenly staring at a crudely written email that had been apparently forcibly fed through the Spam filter.
‘Dear Miss Potts.
You don’t know me and maybe you don’t even know of me, who knows, Tony didn’t say.
I’ve tried contacting you via other channels but this wasn’t gonna work so here. However, I need to tell you this before you or Stane give up or it’s too late.
Tony’s alive.’
Pepper was sure she’d stopped breathing. This had to be a trap.
Some sort of stupid joke.
‘...And I’m aware this sounds crazy but I spoke to him like three days ago. He’s… not well, but alive.
He’ll live. For now. But don’t stop looking. Don’t stop please don’t stop.
I tried to locate him for months but he’s not helpful on that front. He’s in a cave somewhere, I don’t know… I just know it’s in the vicinity of Afghanistan.
He’s asked me to tell you this-’
What followed was the most accurate and precise description of personal facts no one but her knew. This… was it true? Was this a message from Tony?
‘ - and to finish it with ‘That will be all, Miss Potts’. Does that ring any bells?’
It did. Oh, it did.
‘Anyways, this message will delete itself in a few minutes. To save JARVIS some time, I ought to tell him his creator taught me how to hack so he’s not tracking me anytime soon.’
That wouldn’t stop JARVIS from trying.
‘Take care. And please hang on tight. He’s trying to come back. To you.
A friend.’
Was it possible to have your day so utterly changed in a matter of seconds?
When it came to Tony Stark and everything that surrounded him, the answer was probably yes.
So, turns out that if you sleep for almost four weeks people freak out and start making the worst decisions. Figures.
Darcy supposed she could justify everyone’s need to hover for a while. No, she was not going to fall asleep for days again. Yes, she was fine, thank you.
Three days after she’d woken up, the medics grudgingly agreed to let her go. There was nothing actually… wrong with her. They did suggest therapy, though.
The ugly surprises, though, were yet to come.
Indeed, during her running away to the Dream World, Darcy had missed every single one of the internship deadlines she was interested in. The few ones she had been accepted had also been politely rejected by her mother, who’d been regretful to tell her professors that she was being treated at the hospital and thus, unable to make it. Of course, by now all positions had been filled.
She couldn’t fault her mother, but still. She was this close to ending her academic career, she didn’t need another setback.
Ugh.
Now she had two weeks to line up another internship for those credits… or actually go to Maths.
Two weeks into October, and the ‘good spots’ were all gone.
The only thing she could find was a request from an astrophysicist that had the reputation of being a joke in her field. She could probably wing it if she were actually tested on the subject. Well, Tony hadn’t been particularly interested, he was a different kind of engineer, but she had most of the physics basics down, so it… couldn’t be that hard right?
It could. It so so so could.
If she’d felt out of the water when Tony had tried to roughly explain to her how the Arc Reactor worked (with what he’d called ‘the Sixth-grade-friendly explanation’... so yeah), college grade Astrophysics was terrifying. For a while, she feared she’d dream about it too (it didn’t happen because she didn’t dream, but yeah, it probably would have).
As she actually tried to study the thing, she idly wondered if it weren’t better if she just went to class instead of all this.
But then ‘class’ would mean another rent, and college roommates, and nope. Nope. She was done with the college life.
So she tried to actually make sense of the thing she was supposed to know to work for Jane Foster, astrophysicist.
The days started to shorten as they approached the height of winter, and there was still no word about Tony.
She’d kept her word and kept sending messages to Virginia Potts as he’d asked, getting a kick out of the baffled expression she imagined the assistant would sport every time she managed to slip past Tony’s uber smart AI (JARVIS always managed to close the gaps and she was finding it increasingly difficult to override him).
Clarissa was still watching her like a hawk, in case she fell asleep and didn’t wake up, so Darcy tried to keep her appearances in the oniric world as limited as possible.
She was surprised she still managed to have time for her people.
“Is this what you look like?”
“..Mh?” Oh yeah, way to go, Darcy.
Wanda giggled and flicked her ear. “In reality, I mean. Is this what you look like?”
They were relaxing on the banks of a river that Wanda called ‘Privodni’ or something similar. It was one of the calmest she’d seen the twins since they hit fifteen and hormones started raging. Pietro had grown like… three inches in the span of weeks, unless Wanda’s eyes had a completely wrong perception of space.
The Carbuncle looked at herself. Her tiny, fluffy self.
“Uhm, yeah?” she shrugged. “It’s pretty accurate yeah. I mean, I’ve got a human charade thingy going right now, but yah.”
“You’re cute.”
Ugh, ugh, no. “I’m not cute, Wanda.” Wanda opened her mouth to retaliate. “No. I’m fearsome. And powerful. I’m not cute.”
“You’re a ball of fluff the size of a small cat,” snorted Pietro from the tree he was perched on. He was so tall he didn’t need to do it, but he still went for the high places. She had to make sure he never met Clint, or they’d leave for the vents and never come back.
“I’m your elder!” gasped Darcy in mock indignation. “You should respect me. I am the-”
“-nagging Nanny.” Finished Pietro with nonchalance.
Ouch. “Alas, these words kill me!” she exclaimed dramatically and slumped forward.
The twins laughed. The carbuncle huffed.
“Seriously, though, shouldn’t you like, respect me and be very awed? I’m like…”
“-our Surrogate Mama.”
“Yes, that. Thank you, Pietro- Wait.” She stiffened and looked at their bashful faces. Was it possible to melt because of mush feelings? Because she was absolutely feeling mushy right now. “Okay, cool. I need a hug. Before I come down with a serious case of sniffles. And you don’t want to see me with the sniffles.” She was not crying.
“...You’re too tiny to hug both of us.”
Why you little moment Ruiner!
Two things happened the week before Thanksgiving Day.
First, being the only applicant for the internship scored her the job without any kind of test.
Yep. That easy.
Dr Jane Foster wasn’t very impressed with her apparent lack of interest in physics, but she proclaimed very graciously that Darcy would do. They would leave after Winter Break for New Mexico, which was cool. Darcy had hoped to leave like… right away, but she could work with two more months, especially since rent and food would be paid by the bosslady for the entire internship.
Second, Tony was finally found.
The truth is
I am Iron Man.
Oooooh.
She was going to s trangle him. With her fucking tail. She still wasn’t sure which one was going to do the deed, but she was going to destroy Tony Stark personally. The left. Probably the left tail.
Unfortunately for her, she was on the other side of the US.
Unfortunately for him, she knew exactly where to find him.
And thus, after checking with bosslady if by chance she was already on site ( ‘Uh… no? I’m leaving at the end of the term, now would be impossible’ ) and repeatedly telling everyone that she was going to New Mexico for her internship right now, Darcy Lewis decided to Shift for the first time in years of calculated camouflage and soared into the open skies.
Destination: Malibu.
The music blasting through the lab was a sound Tony had missed dearly and it was going to take time before he actually got used to his bed again, but he wasn’t going to say that aloud.
Just like he wasn’t going to mention actually missing Dum-E, U and Butterfingers.
So what if he spent the last two days fine-tuning them.
...And working on a new Mark, but that was beside the point.
Thunder rolled over the house, and he was surprised he could even hear it through all the noise in the lab. Huh. He must have worked longer than he thought, because it was dark already.
Maybe I should just go to bed for a while , he reasoned… after this last thing.
“Sir,” JARVIS voiced from above, “you’ve been awake for over fifty hours.”
“That’s correct, Jarvis. Good, good. I feel great.”
“Should I enact protocol Miss Potts, Sir?” the AI supplied helpfully.
Tony jerked up. “No. No no there’s no need for that. I was going to sleep anyways.”
Yeah, that sounded good. He wiped his face with a towel nearby, absently patted Dum-E on the head and walked (staggered) to his room.
Only, when he entered the room, his alarms activated and he wasn’t alone anymore.
“Sir!” How had Jarvis not noticed the intruder? They got to his room .
He reached for a prototype he’d stashed behind the room and pointed it in front of him.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded harshly.
The person in front of him raised their hands hastily, despite not getting to their feet.
“Whoa there, dude.” It was… a girl?
He looked straight at her. Brunette under the big hat and scarves, young and stacked.
“Are you with SHIELD?” He asked again. You had to give it to Fury, this one agent was someone he’d have hit on a good ten years ago. As it was, she was a tad too young for him.
“How do you know about SHIELD?” Wondered the girl, her eyes wide. Too young and a very bad actor, too, he amended.
“You have to give it to Fury, you’re much cuter than Coulson,” he remarked. He still didn’t let go of his weapon.
The girl’s face turned from incredulous to incredulously annoyed. “How is it that every time we meet you hit on me and I have to tell you that I’m so old I could be your fucking ancestor?”
There was only one person he’d had this kind of conversation with. One annoying little person that had been haunting him for years and whose existence he’d only shared with JARVIS. One person he’d tried to track for months.
“...DARCY?!” Now he could say he’d seen it all.
She sniggered, hands still in the air. “Yo,” she gave him a mock salute and raised her woollen hat, exposing her famous, brightly colored, gemmed signature hairpin.
He lowered the blaster prototype. “What are you doing here?”
As if she’d just remembered, her eyebrows immediately furrowed. She stood up and advanced on him. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe I had to rush to my crazy friend from freaking Maine because they’re suddenly a self-declared Superhero?!”
“You live in Maine?” Foot, meet mouth.
“DO NOT SIDESTEP MY POINT!” she roared. She poked him in the chest, right where the Arc reactor was, and for a second stood there, as if mesmerized by her own action. “Sorry,” she shook her head. She promptly punched him in the arm. And ouch, that hurt for real. “Oh, yes, this feels much better,” she nodded. “What in the Quetzal were you even thinking?!”
Tony didn’t expect her words to hit him hard, not really. After Pepper had told him what she thought of the Superhero job, and they’d argued (again), he thought okay, cool, my best friend is not happy but it doesn’t hurt that much (it was a lie). But to hear it from Darcy too, maybe he’d really gotten wrong again. “Yeah, I already knew I’m not a hero, o’ Great Dream Cat.” He rebuked.
“That’s not what I meant and you know it, Tony!” she exclaimed. “I had to find out from the press! The fucking press, Tony! My friend, whom I’ve shared a lot of private stuff with, whom I’ve talked about Mexico and my hopes and who talked to me about just about anything, didn’t feel the need to tell me such an important part of his life! Oh, my God, Tony! I had to find out from the press! We talked every single day since you’ve been back!” She was so outraged her cheeks were puffing and her fists were clenched.
“...Sorry?” He should have outgrown the need to appease people by now, and yet he still felt relief that the Superhero thing was not the problem here.
“You’re not,” she pouted, then shook her head. “What’s done is done. Okay, since I’m here and all, explain the Reactor Shtick again.”
“I can’t believe you just came here with your actual human form and all that,” Tony complained for the umpteenth time that morning. “Where’s the fun now?!”
They had improvised breakfast with some cereals with dubious expiration date and were now basking in the living room, the storm from last night forgotten.
“You tried to get me to tell you my identity from moment one!” she snorted, crossing her legs on the furry carpet of the living room.
“That doesn’t mean you should have!” he stressed again. “But kudos, by the way, very nice shell.”
“Thanks, I try,” she deadpanned. “I’m more worried about that Palladium thing you mentioned in passing, by the way.”
He cringed. “‘s not a big deal.”
“Huh. And here I thought…” she raised her eyebrows, because he wasn’t that good a liar.
“Tell you what,” he added when it was clear that she wasn’t biting. “Trade you. You tell me what’s your involvement with SHIELD, and don’t try to deny, you clearly said ‘how do you know about shield’ so don’t deflect, and I tell you what’s with the Palladium.”
Darcy shook her head resolutely. “No deal.”
Then she noticed Tony’s pout. “Sorry, it’s not my secret to tell.”
He recovered. “Oh, so there is someone in there? Someone I know?”
She shrugged. “They’re friends, I don’t know if you know them, I won’t betray them.”
“Fair enough.”
They stared at each other for a few seconds. “So, anyway, Darcy Lewis from Culver, Maine,” he started smirking. “How did you get in here?”
The carbuncle shrugged. “I flew.”
“Flew?” he mouthed. “Yeah no, no plane, I meant here.”
“Plane?” Darcy laughed incredulously. She’d never been on one of those traps, give her a bus any day. “I’m a broke ass student from Maine, Tony. Political Science, at that. I literally flew all the way. Probably scared the life out of some ornithologist too, but I didn’t much care for blending in at the time.”
Tony sputtered. “Still doesn’t explain how you got past security, kitten.”
Ugh, no, not the cutesy nicknames. She grimaced at the moniker, and he cackled a bit.
Fine. She sighed and focused.
Her gem sparked red and she just had enough time to see his awestruck face before the world twisted and she was suddenly engulfed by the shag carpet.
She unfurled her tiny wings and with a solid flap rose just above the fur of the carpet.
Tony gasped and dropped to the ground. “DARCY?!” he squinted at her. “IS THAT YOU?!”
His voice was loud, too loud for her tiny body. She twisted again, and here she was, in all of her ten inches fluffy glory. “YES!” She meowed.
That shut him up.
Was she going to gloat for eternity of actually being able to shut Tony Stark up? Oh yes, yes she was.
She smiled, showing off her tiny teeth. “So, Palladium?”
What he told her was horrifying.
He could either remove his Arc Reactor and die because of the shrapnel in his heart, almost immediately, or he could keep it in and die slowly and painfully by Palladium poisoning. Oh, God.
Her hand flew to her hairpin and she fingered the Central Stone.
It won’t work. A tiny part of her nagged. The stone removes ailments, and ailments are not a very real metal shard in your heart. You can’t cure that.
Healing Tony Stark was out of her possibilities and competences, unless she became a surgeon in record time, time Tony did not have.
But she could help him, if only for a while.
“Do you have Amethysts in the house?” She asked suddenly.
“Sorry?”
“Amethysts. Tiny ones will do. No family jewels, I need to break the stones from the metal.”
If Tony was surprised by the request, he didn’t show it. He wordlessly left the room.
He came back a few minutes later, with a tacky thing dappled in purple gems.
“Do I get to watch the Magic?” he joked. “Or is it a secret?”
Pfffft.
“Don’t be silly, just give me the stones. I’m surprised I didn’t think about it before!” She grumbled. This kind of thing would have helped Clint and Nat a lot in the past. She supposed it was a thing to remedy for the future.
Unclasping the necklace took ages, and taking out the gems took even longer, despite Tony’s skills.
But in the end, they had over twenty gems at their disposals. It would do.
“Okay,” Darcy nodded. “Now I just need to…” She removed her Amethyst from the hairpin. The stone dropped to the ground soundlessly.
“I’m going to push my Stone’s magic into these, yeah? Try to get them to work.”
The Carbuncle put the gems one by one in her pin, waited until they shone with light, and repeated the process.
Over and over the cryptid swapped the purple rocks until they were shining despite being on the ground. Then put her own gem back.
“Ta-da!” she exclaimed dramatically, dropping the stones in Tony’s hand.
Tony stiffened. “Whoa,” he breathed. His posture straightened and his shoulders relaxed. The tension around his smile eased, as well. “That is one neat trick!”
“They’re not that powerful,” Darcy said mournfully. “But they should keep your body free of poisons. Those should last for… Three years? Something? But Tony, they are not a permanent solution, yeah? And the symptoms could get worse if I underestimated this thing, okay?”
He nodded. “Got it, kitten- I mean, Shorty… So… Any other cool trick up your sleeve?” He eyed her gems.
Darcy shrugged helplessly. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t expected the question. “Not really. Obsidian’s against mind control, Opal is the Dream stone and no before you ask, you can’t enter the Dream world. Then there’s Fluorite, that one heals broken bones.”
“Mh,” He mumbled, but didn’t elaborate. “So, did I introduce to my kids again?”
“You have kids?!”
Pepper Potts was a woman on a mission.
The last four days, Tony had given no signs of life whatsoever.
No calls, no notes, no emails, nothing. No holo messages or those pings he liked to send through Jarvis, either.
In fact, weren’t for JARVIS telling her everything was ‘fine’ and ‘Sir was alive’, she would have stormed the house much sooner.
As it was, today he’d missed his fifth board meeting, and she wasn’t having his shit anymore.
“-Come on!”
“Nooooo! Tony, I need to hit the road already!”
The voices coming from Tony’s private lab made her stop in her tracks. Was that a woman’s voice?
“Oh please, I could take you anywhere!”
“Yes! On your private, personal jet! Because that won’t ping anyone’s suspicions, nooooo! Don’t you think I’ll have everyone’s eyes on me if Tony Stark just… takes me to New Mexico?! I should be there already, I told everyone I was going there so that I could check on you, but I need to actually get there to graduate!”
Oh, God.
Pepper felt weak. An undergrad. Tony was in his labs with an undergrad, who had escaped her guardians pretending to be in New Mexico. She… she would be allowed to faint in this situation, right?
“Jarvis… what is going on?” she was afraid to ask, she should just walk away.
“I’m not at liberty to say, Miss Potts,” the AI answered politely.
Okay, Potts. You’re made of strong stuff. You’ll make it.
She steeled herself, ready to cover her eyes in front of any kind of nudity and ready to reprimand Tony for everything, and descended the stairs to the lab.
Well, at least they were clothed.
However, the girl was trapped in some sort of fireman carry as Tony had apparently apprehended her from leaving.
“TONY, WHAT IS GOING ON!”
Everything in the lab stopped.
The bots ceased their whirrings, Dum-E dropped his fire extinguisher, Tony and the girl froze.
Even Jarvis was probably holding his breath.
“Pepper!” Tony’s face split into a smile, but to Pepper’s surprise, it wasn’t faked like when she walked in on him and a ladyfriend. He was truly happy to see her. “Come meet my one and only Pupil!”
“Your what!” the girl gasped indignantly, “YOU are the pupil here. Kid. Oh God, I’m actually arguing the point. Put me down, Tony, I need to leeeeeeeeeeeave-!” Tony swung her around slightly and then put her back on her feet. The young woman swayed.
She was feeling dizzy for the girl, now.
“Hi!” Well, she had one quick recovery, at least. “I’m Darcy, Tony’s always talking about you. it’s so nice to finally meet you in the flesh!” Aaand had a nice smile.
Actually.
Pepper looked at Tony’s smile, then back at Darcy’s.
“Oh God, do we need to file a settlement for your illegitimate daughter?”
“Eh?” Tony’s face morphed into a mix of glee and disgust it was actually pretty funny to watch.
The girl’s face followed suit. “No. No no no no, for the Quetzal, no no. And on that note, I’m leaving. I need to actually hit the road and be in New Mexico.”
Pepper’s boss wasn’t having it “No no come on, Shortstacks! You can do better than that! If you only let me pay you a plane ticket.”
“No, Tony! No paper trail!” She exclaimed wearily. Apparently, it was an old argument.
“But-!”
“Nope.”
And suddenly she was forgotten as they went back to discussing eventual ways of transportation.
But by now Pepper had remembered that she actually needed Tony today.
She clapped her hands and loudly said, smiling, “May I suggest the train?”.
Ah, their speechless faces were going to be rainy days material.
Twenty hours of train were a madness she was never going to replicate.
And forever be damned the person who’d suggested that.
No, that wasn’t fair. Miss Potts had given them the obvious solution and there was no way she could have reached New Mexico at the same speed by wingpower alone.
But still.
Never. Ever. Again.
And now here she was. Puente Antiguo. With… only the clothes on her back.
She hadn’t thought this through at all.
Fortunately, Jane Foster was good people and had left the keys of the place to the only town’s diner owner, Ms Alvarez.
Doubly fortunately, Tony had left her with enough cash to redo her whole wardrobe without fuss. And stock the pantry. And refill the decrepit van Jane had inherited from she didn’t exactly know whom.
The bosslady wasn’t bound to get on site for at least another two weeks.
Plenty of time. Life was good.
The shining expanse of the Dream world was always a source of wonder and delight.
Not today, of course. But it usually was.
Darcy’s gem blazed and the light seared the offending Mare. The beast howled furiously and spat viciously at the carbuncle.
“Get back in line, you beast,” spat Darcy back, showing off her teeth and swishing her tails. “You’re not welcome here. Leave.” Her gem sparked in response.
The Mare huffed furiously, its acid breath mixing with its spittle and Darcy readied for its attack.
But it never came. The monster huffed again, and slunk out of the dream it was infesting.
“And don’t come back!” the tiny magical cat shouted back at it.
Okay, this should be the last polluted dream, really, she thought, satisfied.
She loved a job well done, and this was a personal record of five monsters in a night. She supposed they’d gotten more lively lately, what with her not being as present with the whole ‘Tony is Iron Man’ debacle.
Her conscious floated out of the infested dream with a swish and in a twirl, she was back into her domain.
The colors would never cease to amaze her.
Speaking of colors, she should probably spend some time with Steve, she hadn’t heard from him in a while.
She’d asked Tony about the North Pole excavation sites and he’d confirmed that yes, they were still looking ( ‘Why, is he down there?... Wait… you mean he’s alive down there?!’ ), but much like in his case, with no specific coordinates and with the ocean’s currents flowing all over, Captain America’s rescue was an impossible treasure hunt.
Easy as breathing, Steve’s molten gold shine came to her almost immediately.
Huh. S he must have done more miles than she’d thought… This seems much earlier than Greenland. Actually, this doesn’t seem like the Ocean at all…
Still, she’d only met one soul with a golden sheen, and that was undoubtedly Steve.
Maybe he’d gotten out!
Darcy took a good look around.
No polluted stuff all around her. Everything was fine. Good, she deserved a break today. She was going to Steve.
There were stars.
Stars all over and all around.
It was… truly beautiful.
Constellations hovered over an ink painted sky, so dark every single shiny spot was a lighthouse.
She knew Steve was an artist, but this… this was beyond anything she’d seen him do.
Then she noticed she didn’t have the usual, natural carbuncl-y look Steve used to dream her in, and was instead very human.
And the person who was staring at her totally wasn’t Steve.
“Who are you?” the young woman staring at her had chalk in her hair and was holding a ballpen and a notepad. Was she an artist? Must be dedicated to her job to even dream of drawing.
“I’m Darcy,” she said, shrugging.
“Oh. Nice to meet you, Darcy,” the woman smiled happily, but wasn’t really focused on her. She was gazing at the stars avidly, as if they could disappear at any given moment and she had to make the most of it. She grabbed her pen and started drawing furiously.
Darcy felt the sudden urge to sit closer to her to take a look.
“What are you doing?” she just had to ask.
“Calculating the actual chances of an Einstein-Rosen bridge appearing at this very moment.”
Eh?
“Huh?” Einstein-Rosen bridge? Oh God, she’d heard that somewhere, hadn’t she?
“Ha! I don’t expect you to understand, it’s astrophysics, but the sky here is perfect for an anomaly to show up. Mind you, they usually appear in thunderstorms so maybe not… but…” Wait.
“Oh! I’m sorry, Darcy!” the woman dropped her notepad and extended a hand in her direction swiftly. “I didn’t get to introduce myself, I’m Jane. Jane Foster. You know? You’re called just like my new intern!”
Oh, Fuck.
The next few days Darcy had managed to scare herself into a panic.
Would Dr Jane Foster recognize her? Was her cover blown?
She’d never met Jane Foster in person before invading her dream like a tactless elephant, they’d only talked via mail and through the phone, so there was no way Jane Foster could have imagined her before actually meeting her, right?
Maybe she’d seen pictures , her mind supplied. But it was a small comfort.
There was no way she could shift into another form, because everyone in Puente Antiguo and at Culver knew her like this. Oh Quetzal, she was totally busted.
Would Jane Foster tell?
Would the government come and take her away?
Would she need to run for it?
In the end, she decided to just wait and see, because maybe maybe the astrophysicist wouldn’t really recognize her, right? Not many people remembered their dreams anyway. Some kids, her friends, but mostly, nothing really stuck.
Of course, that wasn’t going to be the case with Jane Foster.
The tiny woman (and she used the term loosely here, because while they were almost the same height, Jane was so thin and frail looking she was bordering on waifish) arrived on what had to be the most stupidly humid day of Winter in the last weeks. The rain was pouring all over and the idea of getting wet was seriously unappealing.
Darcy had started on soldering one of Jane’s precious ‘it’ll hold together as long as there’s tape’ machines and was now fixing the joints. She’d done that a lot lately, because those things had the tendency to simply… destroy themselves overnight.
She was bent over the thing she’d now dubbed ‘Steve’, because it was tiny and unobtrusive (unlike Tony in the corner right??? ), when the bosslady finally walked in, shaking in her jacket like a wet dog.
She opened the gas station doors so suddenly that the windows trembled.
“Darcy Lewis???” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
Darcy jumped away from Steve as if burned, jerking the wrench away and probably popping one or two bolts in the process.
“Dr Jane Foster?” she gulped.
Dr Jane Foster did a double take. “Have we met before?”
Darcy shook her head quickly. “No, we haven’t, we totally totally haven’t.”
“I could have sworn-” the woman mumbled. Then she shrugged and took her jacket off. “I’m going to put it somewhere where it’s not dripping all over.”
Darcy nodded, relieved. “Mh mh. There’s food in the other room if you want. I’m just fixing Steve here.”
The other woman nodded easily. “Okay. Thanks,” and she left for the kitchen.
For a few minutes, Darcy could almost convince herself that everything was going to be fine.
Then she heard a crash.
And Jane Foster was right in front of her, her finger pointed and her eyes blazing “YOU WERE IN MY DREAM!”
Okay, Jane, you just sounded crazy, you know that, right? Right?
Maybe she shouldn’t have said that.
Now the intern was going to bolt, because she had to be completely nuts.
The last few months Jane had lost intern after intern, and she couldn’t really afford to lose another, especially since the term was over and she was going to stay in New Mexico for the next six months.
And also because Darcy had fixed the whole equipment on her own just following her vague instructions via phone ( ‘Don’t worry, bosslady, I’ve got a friend who can help me with building and fixing stuff!’ ) and could cook, but that was another matter entirely.
She was so certain the blundering girl in front of her had been in her dreams. And it was impossible that she could have just made her up. She’d never seen Darcy Lewis in person.
So, either she had some sort of prophetic dream or premonition, or the girl was trying to bullshit her.
...Which of course made no sense because this was bordering on the ludicrous.
Walk away now, Jane. Apologize and walk away. No one has to know. It would be the smart thing to do.
But Jane hadn’t become one of the youngest female astrophysicists by letting go.
There was one thing she’d gotten especially good at, though. Staring people down until they spilt their guts. It had worked especially well against her colleagues, lately.
The girl squirmed, but didn’t back down on the staring competition.
After the first fifteen minutes, Jane was ready to back down. This was becoming awkward. She didn’t even know what she was trying to prove, actually.
“Sorry, you must think I’m crazy,” she sighed dejectedly.
“Oh! It-It’s okay, no problem, dude!” was it relief on her face? “I’ve seen worse than people accusing me of stalking their dreams, actually.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes,” the girl nodded. “Pass me the wrench back, will you? I need to fix Steve before we can use it!” The fact that the girl had given names to her machines was… peculiar.
“I’ve actually been accused of being a Miracle Child when I was little, and just lately I was basically Sleeping Beauty. Couldn’t wake me up for almost a month, they couldn’t.” The girl seemed unconcerned by the fact that she’d slept for over three weeks. “So yeah, starry night dreams encounter seems pretty mild.” Hang on.
“AHA!” Jane exclaimed, and the intern paled. “Starry night, huh?” Her face was probably creepy right now, right?
Darcy’s face had reached pasty white in the span of three seconds. “So, uhm, this is the part where I run away and you don’t call the police, right? Or at least give me an hour of head start?”
“What?” Okay, this was not the reaction she’d expected. She had ho- Oh. Of course, someone with the power to penetrate people’s dreams wouldn’t want others to know, right? That must be some kind of, well, X-Gene shtick or special power, right?
Well. She had pretty much forced a girl to out herself to a complete stranger. Way to go, Jane!
“-I mean, I can run pretty fast but I’d really rather take a bus before you alert the government suits?” The young woman was piling more and more words on top of each other and Jane was starting to lose the point.
She didn’t want Darcy to leave, of course, and she couldn’t care less about mind wandering. Well, no. She’d had Donald-based dreams lately which she didn’t really want to- She blushed.
“Did you see any other dream?”
Darcy started. “No? It was an accident, I swear, you’ve got a very peculiar color and I thought it was a friend of mine. I didn’t see anything else.”
Okay. Okay, that was good. Not exceptional, but yeah, she could deal with Star related dreams. If Darcy hadn’t seen anything else, she was cool with that.
The intern was inching towards the door, ready to bolt.
“Wait! Who’s going to fix my equip if you leave?” she whined. That… wasn’t exactly what she wanted to say, but yeah.
Darcy’s incredulous noises had her plough on, though. “I mean, we’re going to need ground rules and no prying in my dreams and I have so many questions but yeah.”
“You’re not alerting the suits.”
“I’m not alerting the suits,” Jane assured promptly.
“Okay… cool.” It was like watching a wild creature approach for the first time.
Jane extended her hand, like in the dream, and Darcy timidly took it. “I’m Jane, Dr Jane Foster.”
“I’m Darcy Lewis, the Great Carbuncle…”
The next few months passed in a blur of colors and more explaining than Darcy had ever needed to do.
Not unlike Tony, Jane had grown up with stories about the magical cats with horns that were born out of wishes (‘ seriously, no. It’s cheesy and disrespectful’ ) and wanted to know everything. From what they were like, where they came from, what did they eat?
Darcy was cool with answering, considering Jane was asking polite and considerate questions instead of dissecting her.
They had bonded over margaritas one night and there wasn’t really a point in hiding anymore. Not when you get to curl at the end of the bed without Jane judging, anyways.
But soon after Tony managed to have someone deliver a box full of stones to Puente Antiguo, things got a little more complicated.
When they actually managed to open it, because it had so much tape it was stupid (Tony had probably wrapped it on his own to be inconspicuous and dropped it to the nearest post box), they couldn’t contain the gasp.
Lined up in neat little rows, were at least a hundred gemstones.
Aaaand this prompted even more questions, because ‘What do you need the stones for?’ ‘Please I have all the questions!’ became more and more frequent .
The Carbuncle had to admit she kind of liked the attention.
“-And so you just need to wear this thing, or keep it in your pocket, and you never have to worry about mind control again?” Jane fingered the round obsidian sceptically.
“Yes,” Darcy nodded. “I have no way to prove it to you, but you can always try the emerald instead? I got it when I was ten, fifteen years ago or so I mean, so it’s not as strong as my other gems I got in my fourth cycle- that would be when I was two hundred or so, by the way- but yep.”
“Nice. Is there a stone for super strength or something?”
Darcy winced. “Yeah, that’d be the Ruby.”
“Sore spot?” grimaced her boss.
“Nah, ‘s just that Rubies are painful to conquer. Like, really painful. They fight you every step, yeah? Besides, the number of gems I have never touched because the Empire we thought was so big was actually so tiny is staggering. Jade, for example, we had that but never got close enough to steal it or touch it. Who knows what Jade could do? Or Aquamarine? All a great mystery!”
“And you never thought to explore the possibilities?” Jane wondered incredulously.
“Broke college student here? Yeah no. Besides, I’m happy with what I have. My plans for life were ‘find a van, find my friends, live happily ever after’ so… And it’s actually a pretty recent plan, too. I never thought I’d escape the Oniric World.”
“...I think it’s a beautiful plan,” her friend said with conviction.
“...Thanks, Janey.”
“Darcy Lewis, you truly are a credit to your family. This food is delicious,” declared Erik Selvig, patting his stomach.
Darcy loved Jane and Erik.
The two astrophysicists were good people. Erik was Jane’s surrogate father, dear friend and colleague of her late dad. He loved meatballs, cursing in Swedish and had a penchant for losing his belt. Everywhere.
He was an enthusiastic bonafide cook, too, and they bonded over kitchen appliances and finding the best food to give Jane. He had the sense not to work himself to exhaustion, unlike Jane, but had the same passion for his job.
By now, they’d become family as much as her official one and her ragtag team of heroes (plus kids).
They could often be seen in Jane’s van following a ‘hunch’ or a ‘lead’ (often they came back empty handed) and then consoling themselves with Izzy’s wonderful cooking at her Diner.
All in all, it was a good way to spend an internship. With friends.
“So, Steve, what are the chances you and Jane Foster could be related? I’m testing a theory here!”
“...Who’s Jane Foster?”
Infiltrating Stark Industries had been easier than she’d thought possible.
Coulson had told her that her looks would go a long way with Stark, but she hadn’t thought Miss Potts would have been that accommodating with a new recruit.
It probably had to do with the ‘New Stark’.
Since he’d been to Afghanistan, Howard Stark’s heir had changed.
As much as Natasha didn’t like to admit it, because she herself had still trouble to believe people could really change (she was trying, as hard as she could), the rich genius was showing the perfect image of the redeemed billionaire, up front.
No scandals, stable relationship with her secretary (not publically, of course), no drunk accidents or extreme life-threatening episodes.
Fury suspected it was just that, a front. One does not simply invent a super suit and just leave it at that. There must be something Stark wanted, something to capitalize on SHIELD couldn’t see at the moment. If there wasn’t, though, and if the man had truly turned over a new leaf, it was going to be the Black Widow’s job to assess him for Fury’s… other pet project she and Clint had also been evaluated for.
This was her element. Spying and info gathering were where she was at her strongest.
According to her current employer, Miss Potts, Stark spent all of his free time in his lab now, researching a new kind of clean energy, or something to do with the Arc Reactor technology. SHIELD’s intel had told them that by now, the Palladium in Stark’s body should have taken some sort of effect, so it would make sense he’d try to find a solution to that.
However, ‘Stark’s lab’ meant having to penetrate his ‘hidden’ house in Malibu, avoid security and then access the labs.
It could present a problem, or an annoyance on a good day, but then “Natalie, come to the car please, we need to see Mr Stark right away.” Maybe not.
Once in the house, Natasha was confident she could get the information she needed as quickly as possible. She liked and respected Miss Potts enough to not hit on Stark, for now, but her looks alone would probably go a long way (after all, they’d been honed and perfected by history itself), coupled with wide-eyed looks and well-placed questions. If there was one thing that she was certain of, was her ability.
...Well, for one Stark was not dying, or not yet.
He looked… stellar, actually. As healthy and as sarcastic as he’d been at the hearing, with no indication whatsoever of having sudden shivers, deathly pallor, cold sweat or self-destructive tendencies.
She even had to give him props, he leered at her for only four seconds before focusing back on his ‘Pepper’. She could only assume it was quite a feat for the womanizer.
She couldn’t discount he was hiding it very well, especially in front of his girlfriend and her assistant, of course, but she didn’t find a single tell he wasn’t doing alright.
And they weren’t anywhere close to his lab, so she couldn’t even verify his real intentions, for now.
Therefore, she held her judgement and behaved properly, laughing lightly at Miss Potts’s jokes and smiling professionally to Mr Stark.
But then Miss Potts turned her back on them to get some more papers, and he turned to her quickly and sharply, scrutinizing her. Had she been found out? Impossible .
His eyes darted to Virginia, who was still commenting on saving the seals to save the environment or something similar, and she tried to keep her composure as he stared her down.
“Darcy??” he asked suddenly, as quiet as he could.
Her mind reeled. Darcy? What Darcy? That Darcy? No, no that wasn’t possible. Darcy was a pretty common name, wasn’t it? Yeah, he’d probably confused her for someone else. Maybe he was-
“Honestly, Tony!” sighed Miss Potts from behind them. “Stop calling them all Darcy, it’s getting ridiculous!”
She then turned to a shell-shocked Natasha. “I’m sorry about that. He’s convinced every mildly attractive female, or male for that matter, has to be called Darcy or some variation of the name.” She hit his head playfully. “This is Natalie Rushman, Tony, not yet another Darcy.”
“Don’t hit me, Pep!” he complained. “And I found four Darcy this way, so I so am right.”
“Yes,” Pepper deadpanned. “Out of at least three hundred eighty-five people you called ‘Darcy’, you found no less than four Darcys. Such an achievement.”
Natasha kept her face politely interested and smiled dazzlingly, as her mind regrouped. What an… oddly specific quirk of Stark, looking for people called Darcy. She wondered how it had come about really, it made no sense.
Then her eyes fell on the leather bracelet he was wearing on his wrist, a simple band full of shiny things. Green, black and purple.
A sense of foreboding filled her.
Those colors were the ones for Amethyst, Obsidian and Fluorite, specifically. Was it just a coincidence? That was too much of a coincidence, right? If this was really as she suspected… Oh, God. Not him.
Jane Foster and Steve Rogers were not related.
According to both of them.
And yet Jane’s soul was as pure and unpolluted as Steve’s was.
That… that actually spoke volumes about the bosslady, really.
Darcy was kind of elated. Not one, but two wonderfully, golden, shiny souls within her domain, and both of them she could call friends.
What a time to be alive, or, well, not stone!
Not to say that her other friends weren’t as important, of course, in fact, both Nat and Tony were getting more golden by the day, and so was Clint, but yeah. She could recognize a completely uncorrupt soul.
As the self-appointed Guardian of Dreams (because she met Gods and she’d been called one once, and never again would she enter that Carbunco temple in Texcoco of her own free will), she was a very good judge of character.
At least until she met the greenest stream of magic she’d ever seen, and instead of ending up in a magical place of peace… she met a devastated front filled with tanks and fire and panic.
Whoa there. Something whizzed past her at breakneck speed and she reflexively jumped up, floating mid-air.
Okay, cool. Never let it be said that she couldn’t learn something new, she was hardly a dog (despite being old).
Also, it sorta looked… like a videogame. Or a badly executed but extremely realistic action movie.
There was the army, the city in ruins, the running tiny humans and yep. There it was.
The giant, green monster.
She was sort of disappointed, it didn’t look much like a monster. Oh well.
The man at the edge of the city didn’t think so. “This is bad, this is really, really bad.” He was holding his head in his hands and trying to make himself as tiny as possible.
The carbuncle sighed and her tails twitched. Should she? The last time she consoled someone, she ended up adopting them like the mother she was never supposed to be. Not that she regretted it, but this one was hardly a child in need of care, right?
Well, in for a penny…
She landed softly behind him right as the green huge man started throwing debris at the soldiers.
“Hi!” she smiled as sunnily as she could.
He didn’t hear her. Or ignored her, which was worse.
“Hi!” she said again, getting a step closer.
Nothing.
Her tails shook with irritation. She got yet another step closer. “Hey?”
No reaction.
Should she poke him? Bite him? Maybe it would shock him into answering. But then again, she didn’t much fancy attracting the others’ attention. So she sat beside him, her fuzzy paws as close as possible to his thigh, and waited for him to acknowledge her.
“Dude, are you even okay?” she asked, concerned, when it was clear that it wasn’t happening anytime soon.
“No, no of course not,” he whispered. “I’m green! Of course, I’m not okay.”
Darcy stared incredulously at him. Was this guy for real? “Dude… you look pink to me?”
The hands lowered a little and one eye peeked at her, only to widen in surprise, so she, of course, started rambling defensively. “Or at least, a healthy pink-brownish color? Can’t claim to be as fabulous as my sleek noisette -it’s a thing, an actual color, I checked-, but you look like… fine? ” she finished lamely.
By now the man was openly gawking at her with his mouth agape. “What in the world are you?”
Well now. “Well now!” she turned her head, miffed. “How rude. I’m a who, not a ‘what’.”
This prompted more gaping. And after five minutes, something poked her right tail. “Whoa there, Mister!” she jumped.
He retreated his finger as if burned. “I’m… so sorry. I’ve never seen some…-one like you,” he tried to apologize.
She sniffed imperiously, annoyed that someone would poke her to gauge her reaction. Then again, she’d been about to do the same to him not ten minutes earlier. “It’s fine, I suppose,” she admitted grudgingly. “I was about to bite your hand because you weren’t listening to me.”
He winced. “Don’t do that, no, bad idea. You could provoke the Other Guy.”
“...Who?”
The man didn’t elaborate, just passed a hand through his black curls and pointed to the commotion up ahead.
The giant green man roared in outrage and demolished another building.
Darcy inhaled sharply. She looked back and forth between the man and the Other Man. “That’s him. You. Or sorta.”
He nodded miserably. “That’s the Other Guy.”
Great, Darcy, just great. This is exactly why you should stop meddling. She’d never met someone quite like this man. Someone with another fully working man inside of them she’d met, split personality was a thing, but… This one was much more like Mr Hyde on superjuice… And she was woefully unprepared to work around the green ball of... anger and pain.
“Is he… always… like this?” She could hardly believe such a thing. Humans didn’t work like that, and she’d seen some weird shit in her life.
“Oh, yes. The Other Guy is always angry. And smashing. It’s his favourite word, actually, ‘smash’.”
“You’re being awfully forthcoming with information,” she peered suspiciously at him, maybe he was pulling her tails.
“You’re a talking cat, you’re not going to tell the government I’m the guy that turns into the Other Guy,” he shrugged.
“I’m not a cat. I’m a Carbuncle... Wait!” This was real? Like… “There’s a physical transformation in the real world? Like, you can turn into the Other Guy?”
This made the man even more miserable. Never mind that she had mentioned the fact that this wasn’t real. He wasn’t really paying attention.
“Wow,” she choked, a bit awed. “I mean, your alter ego seems pretty strong.”
“He is,” he confirmed glumly. “I’ve seen him spit out bullets and resist explosions with nary a scratch.”
Darcy whistled, impressed. “That is some bodyguard you’ve got there. I’m Darcy, by the way.”
“...Bruce.”
Darcy Lewis would have never linked the encounter with Bruce and the Other Guy with the explosion at Culver had she met them a few days earlier. As it was, the timing was too convenient and the tanks too familiar for her to ignore.
She resolved to look for Bruce’s green and ask him next time she had time.
For now, however, they had bigger and more pressing problems.
They’d been following Jane’s readings into storms and into the deepest parts of the desert (so much, in fact, that Darcy was sure she was going to become a fennec fox) when a man had literally… well, maybe? Fallen from the sky. And Jane hit him with the van.
So... they had just tasered (she had, and it was beautiful) a hammered guy found in the desert.
And now they were responsible for him. “His name is Donald,” she repeated firmly, ignoring Jane.
‘Thor ’ was not going to fly. Yes, the guy was probably barking mad and had drunk at the fountain of folly a little too hard, but that was no reason to indulge in the weird name parade.
A name like ‘Thor’ would totally raise some questions, while Donald was inoffensive (mostly. Jane’s old Donald was an asshole). If the guy’s name really was Thor, they could always chalk it up to a misunderstanding.
What worried her more, apart from the whole ‘Hammer Hammer’ thing, was that the guy smelled wrong even to her weaker, human nose.
And that she couldn’t feel his mind with her Central Stone. Which was sick, right? That had to be a mistake.
But it left her queasy enough not to push her luck.
The next day, Jane hit him with her van. Again.
Alien Prince from Outer Space.
This was so, so so much worse than she thought it would be.
Darcy had expected genetic anomaly, had dreaded X-Gene carrier, but this won the cake, the crown and ran away with it, too!
The suits were going to come, they were going to find her and lock her up and destroy her, she’d need to run, to become a dog or something similar, there would be no hiding ever!
Okay, Darcy, don’t panic.
New Mexico had to be cursed. In seven months Darcy had received more shocks than she had in her whole human life.
Okay. Okay.
No more Shifting. No more cuddles with Jane, no more magically charging gemstones within her hairpin until the situation was over.
Darcy looked mournfully at the still uncharged Opals in the case. She’d just barely finished Clint’s and Natasha’s bands with Fluorite and Obsidian. She’d have to catch up later and finish Steve’s.
Thankfully, Thor’s biceps were useful for weightlifting, so they could safely store everything personal in the cellar downstairs.
Thor was a bag full of cats. A sort of mixed blessings altogether. You didn’t really know if the cats were going to scratch you or just purr at you, but you knew they would be adorable while doing it.
At first glance, the Asgardian looked every bit the big oaf or the pumped frat boy, boisterous and loud, but while those were usually accompanied by a pea-sized brain, Thor had as much knowledge of the Nine Realms (they were his reality after all) as Tony knew about mechanics and Steve about the ‘40s.
It was fascinating.
Darcy had seen a lot of the world through other people’s eyes, but she would be hard-pressed to imagine seeing everything and everywhere like Heimdall did.
And the stones. The gems they couldn’t even imagine or make up in their head because they were that different. Thor spoke with Jane of the stars, but didn’t mind sharing with her anything she wanted to know about the rocks of his planet.
She didn’t really know if he was just kidding about half the stuff he spoke about, but the mere idea of a Hammer made from a dying star that could command lightning and thunder , that was unreal. And amazing. She wanted one too.
Just as predicted, SHIELD ( why, oh why had it to be SHIELD) came two days later.
It came in vans and stole all of Jane’s research. This was bad.
And Clint was with them. This was worse.
The only way it could have been worse still, would have been if Natasha had been with them too, but thankfully she was with Tony at Stark Industries, fixing whatever mess Ivan Vanko had put them in.
She wanted to see them, she wanted to meet them right now, but she knew it totally wasn’t the time. They owed SHIELD and Coulson a lot, and she wouldn’t dare to yank their loyalties around. For now, it was best if she stayed put and didn’t put them between a rock and a hard place. She could wait and keep them company in the Dream world. For now, it would be enough.
She didn’t actually see Clint, mind, but she knew he was rarely used on civilian targets anyways. He’d been probably sent to the 084 in the desert, where he was more useful anyway.
Who she did see, instead, was the infamous Phil Coulson.
Clint Barton had seen a lot in his life.
He also liked to say that to himself every time something happened and he was blown out of the water.
He was there when shit went south with his da’ and his mother and Barney got him out to join the Circus.
He was there when a talking cat with a horn found him in his dreams.
He was there when said cat-Carbuncle stuck around, even if he was a mess, back then like now.
When Barney stabbed him and left him to die, and the Carbuncle healed him overnight.
When he became a killer for hire and Coulson shot him in a leg.
When he became SHIELD and was sent to assassinate the Black Widow, and got a friend in exchange.
When said friend had more in common with him than he thought, and when they found they had another thing in common in Darcy the talking cat.
When Budapest happened.
When a Hammer and a 084 fell from the sky and landed in New Mexico.
Now this. A man had walked alone into their camp and had almost reached the aforementioned Hammer. To be honest, he was kind of starting to root for the guy. But Coulson would get this pinched look he developed whenever he was ‘starting to root for someone’, so he should probably warn him he was considering it. Yeah.
“Take him down, Agent Barton,” exhaled Coulson. “Show’s over.”
Sorry, dude, nothing personal .
So, Thor was late.
Like, really late.
Darcy wasn’t worried, not at all, but even the thugs that had been observing them from moment one had left. This wasn’t a good sign, right?
She was alone, with Erik. With no information.
Well… she was alone now.
She grabbed a granola bar from the cupboard and went into the bathroom.
For precaution, she carefully closed the door (without locking it, who knew when Erik would need it) and tore into the food. She wasn’t hungry, but heck if she’d learnt her lesson about Shifting on an empty stomach.
She opened the window as little as she could, and then focused.
Her Stone sparked red, and she felt herself shrinking.
Okay, she had promised to stay put, but man was she really worried about them (and she wanted to see the Mew Mew, but no matter).
Besides, the skies were exceptionally clear tonight and no one really noticed bats anyways.
The SHIELD makeshift compound was huge.
Filled with plastic and glass and people in hazmat suits, it looked a lot like an anthill crawling with its inhabitants. The spiral design wasn’t helping either.
Darcy looked around and noticed Jane’s van leaving in the darkness.
Great, cool. Jane had left.
She approached the base and landed softly on a plastic sheet that composed a great part of the roof. Underneath her perch, a grunt was snoring softly, precariously perched on a chair.
Good job, Darcy. Now shift into something else and-
“Agent Marks,” barked someone behind her.
She froze.
Agent Marks jumped three feet in the air, the chair clattering to the ground. “Agent Barton, sir,” she squeaked.
Crap.
Clint was staring at the agent with a heavy frown on his face.
Darcy inched towards the plastic tunnel. She wasn’t going to stick around for Clint to spot her, bat form or not. The kid had exceptional eyes and would totally notice the gems on her wings.
Clint’s frown eased all of sudden. “Didn’t mean to scare you, Beth. I mean, sorry,” he shrugged easily, dropping on a chair in front of the rapidly wilting Beth Marks. “I’m looking for ideas for Coulson’s present, his birthday is in a few days…”
Darcy snorted. This was so Clint.
She dropped from her perch and left, determined to explore a bit more before leaving to find Jane.
Unfortunately for her, finding Jane was going to wait. At the end of the tunnel was what was probably a holding cell. And Thor was inside.
The Carbuncle-bat felt a pang in her heart. Oh man, he looked completely broken. What happened?
“Lady Darcy?” Her heart stopped … What? What the what?
But Thor’s eyes weren’t leaving her tiny form, tracking it wherever she went.
Thor could see her. Through her disguise. Not even the bio scans of the medics had been able to see through that! She’d been in hospitals before, her Shifting was perfect .
Yet, the Alien Prince from outer space could spot her and recognize her.
“Did you say something?” a man in an expensive looking suit asked, very interested.
Thor broke eye contact and shook his head.
Darcy understood, it was time to beat it.
Erik was probably the only responsible adult in the group, if she didn’t count herself as she wasn’t 100% human.
When he heard what had happened, he immediately went to get Thor back. Well, ‘Donald’.
Stark’s teachings had come in useful, and while the false documents didn’t really hold long against SHIELD, it lasted long enough for them to get home.
Living with Thor had suddenly become easier and at the same time more awkward.
He had given up most of his overly enthusiastic attitude and was now much more relaxed (or resigned).
However, he watched her like a hawk. His brother, he’d disclosed to her when she asked, had the same shape-shifting abilities, and he’d used them over and over to stab him. No matter how many times Darcy would tell him that no, she couldn’t do inanimate objects because those didn’t have a will, and that he could just stop asking, he insisted on blindly calling ‘Darcy?’ and poking every other object whenever she wasn’t in sight.
Jane found it hilarious, but then again bosslady had tinted lenses for the big guy.
From her part, Darcy had tried multiple times into discreetly mind-reading Thor, but to no avail. Asgardians were clearly on another wavelength entirely, because they technically didn’t exist even in the Dream world.
It made a twisted sort of sense, they probably had an Asgardian dream world or shared collective space, but she still felt a twinge of disappointment. She would have liked to get to know some of them better.
Of course, the next day came the Warrior Three, Lady Sif and a murderbot from Hell, so she wasn’t that enthused anymore.
Packing was the most tedious part of fieldwork.
It was why Clint usually beat it whenever it was time to leave. He’d spend the day on a roof somewhere only to magically appear in the trucks as soon as the time was right.
Like this roof, he thought as he stretched leisurely.
After the last few days he really needed a breather. It was supposed to be almost a vacation, what with the 084 being a Hammer. Something nice and easy after Puerto Rico.
But no, of course not.
And now SHIELD had not only to pay amends to Dr Foster (which Clint was pretty sure involved some big favours he couldn’t wait to see Coulson promise), but also fix the town. And that had been boring. And painful. And stressful.
He was seriously overworked, there.
So yep, he rationalized, laying on the roof with his hands under his head and finally closing his eyes, nap time for the birds.
Keee! Keee!
His eyes snapped open.
Circling above his head, its golden plumage shining under the sunlight, was the biggest hawk he’d ever seen.
He knew New Mexico had its fair share of big birds of prey, but this one was definitely noticeable.
The bird circled a bit more above him, then dived sharply in his direction.
Just when he was about to scramble out of the creature’s flight path, the hawk rose again and something dropped in his lap with a faint ‘flop’.
His eyes went quickly to the package, and then back to the bird.
There was a flash of red, and the hawk became a sparrow. Another flash, and the sparrow was gone.
His eyes fell again on the roughly packaged, very scraped package in his lap.
It was the size of a little Rubik Cube, hastily put together. He passed a finger over the sides, and gently scraped a tiny corner, ready to drop it. When it didn’t explode he removed the paper, which had already been damaged by the talons of the hawk.
Three bracelets and a letter fell into his lap.
Dear Clint.
You probably already recognized me, but if you didn’t… Surprise!
These are for you and Natasha, there’s also a tinier one for Coulson, being his birthday and all.
I’m sure you’re still familiar with the power of the stones. They’ll need to be recharged in three years or so, but who knows, maybe by then life will be less stressful and you’ll finally join me on my quest to a quiet life (Ha. Ha. Ha! I tried.)
Take care, and see you soon.
Darcy.
Clint snorted, then the snort turned into a full-blown laugh.
Come on, Darcy, you could have said hello! He almost giggled.
He put one of the bands under his arm protector and fingered the smallest one.
That was exactly the perfect present for Phil.
“You’ve been asleep, Cap. For almost seventy years.”
Yes, he knew that.
It was why he wasn’t freaking out or running away.
Steve Rogers had a pretty clear idea of where and when he was. Darcy had kept him updated for almost all of his life, as short or long as one would consider it.
He hadn’t wanted to bother her too much, but she had insisted. “When they find you,” she used to say. “You’ll need to be up to date, so we can find each other and then find Bucky. He’s still here somewhere, super juiced and with an arm missing from what I was able to glean, but still alive. And we’re going to find him.”
That was the plan. That had been the plan.
Until SHIELD came and got him out of ice.
Because Steve could see it in Fury’s eyes, could see it in the doctors and even in Pierce’s as they talked patronizingly about computers and scanners and smartphones as if he had never seen one (and officially, he never had). They were never really going to let him go.
Not without supervision, or constant eyes on him.
He was their golden goose, for now, and he wasn’t going to give them another supersoldier and a shapeshifter cryptid as well.
Was Darcy hurt by the fact that Steve didn’t tell her he was out of ice?
Oh yes, she was.
She could see his point, she was withholding chasing down Clint and Nat for this very reason, to avoid a conflict of interests, but at least she’d been upfront about it!
They hadn’t been impressed of course, but they had understood (Natalia more than Clint and Darcy had to remind herself that she needed to shower Nat with extra affection when they actually met).
The Shape-shifter had learned by now that SHIELD was determined to suck in every single one of her friends, and a part of her (the one that didn’t resent the spy organization for stealing all of her people) idly wondered how in the Quetzal she’d met so many people all linked to the same thing, but yeah.
For now, she was determined to hate it, despite the good it was doing.
Which was why she was very tempted to spit in Coulson’s eyes, when he turned up to their door. And she even liked Coulson. It was a matter of principle.
“Why should I let you pass, again?” she demanded incredulously.
The agent beside Son of Coul flexed his biceps. Cute, but not intimidating to a Carbuncle, dude.
“Please understand, Miss Lewis, you need to understand,” he was actually adjusting his collar. “There has been a… situation. We need Dr Foster somewhere safe.”
Darcy pursed her lips. “Elaborate.”
Agent Agent sighed very wearily. “Loki has been sighted in a SHIELD facility. He’s taken some of ours and a trained field Agent and might now make a move on persons of interest-”
“Like Thor’s ladyJane,” Darcy breathed, paling. Had it been humans she’d have said ‘bring it’, but Thor had demonstrated time and time again that even when mortal she was no match for him. And Loki could Shapeshift.
Coulson probably followed her train of thought because she didn’t open her mouth before he started. “We’ll keep her safe. We’ll keep you safe. There’s an open spot in the new observatory in Tromso, Norway. I’m sure the astronomers will be thrilled to have Dr Foster with them.”
Darcy nodded, still not completely reassured. “If we go there…”
“Nothing of yours will be touched, you’ll be generously compensated, safe and may bring all of your equipment,” he bargained quickly.
“Erik?” Darcy prompted.
Coulson winced. Oh no. “Dr Selvig is… incapacitated at the moment. We’ll bring him back.”
One of the Agents lowered his head and pressed a hand to his ear. He probably had an earpiece.
“Agent Coulson, sir,” he whispered five seconds later. “Agent Barton and Hill sighted Agent Rumlow and Loki leaving the state line.”
Phil Coulson cursed, and Darcy had only a moment to be relieved Clint was safe, because Loki was around and yes, she didn’t like SHIELD, but she could see Coulson’s point.
“When are we leaving?” she nodded.
Agent Agent nodded. “Tonight.”
Steve Rogers was hiding something.
Natasha didn’t know what, and neither did Clint, but he was hiding it. And not well enough to fool her.
He was unimpressed and too well navigated of the modern world to have awoken just shy of a year prior. Not even an intensive full immersion would have gotten him so used to the novelty of 2012, not even those accelerated courses he’d seen him attend at SHIELD Headquarters.
And he honestly disliked working with them. Them being the whole organization.
Well, that was harsh, but the man wasn’t happy, at all. He looked ready to bolt at any moment.
Even Fury had sensed this, and had placed Agent 13 at his house, just in case.
He was hiding something and she was going to find out.
Clint massaged his arm and her eyes zeroed on him.
He’d been lucky. So lucky. Loki had gone for him, initially, he was the strongest in the room and the closest, and he’d tried the mind-controlling shtick on him. He’d tried, but Darcy’s magical bracelet had held true and it hadn’t worked. The Russian spy was sorry for Rumlow, but if she had to choose, she’d send him to his death every day to save Clint. It wasn’t very heroic, but she never claimed to be a hero.
“Well, now, isn’t it a sight?” Oh, give her a break. “Agent Romanoff!” How had Stark gotten on the Helicarrier? He’d been invited but he wasn’t supposed to come for another four hours at least.
“...Stark,” she almost sighed. Almost.
“Always a pleasure,” he smiled in that arrogant way of his. Then he turned to Clint. “That arm’s not broken, is it?”
“Just sprained,” Clint grunted, and somewhere one of the medics huffed in disdain. Nat could sympathize. It was clearly broken, but nothing the medical staff could do would fix it faster than Darcy’s pendant, which was already stitching the bones together. No sense in immobilizing Clint’s strongest weapons for no reason.
“I can see it, yup,” Stark nodded easily. “Nice bracelet, by the way.”
Clint didn’t react, but she moved subtly closer to him. Just in case she had the impulse to hit Stark.
Steve Rogers rose from his seat and straightened. “Mr Stark.”
“Captain!” Stark took his hand in his and shook vigorously. “Nice to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you.” Natasha honestly couldn’t say if the cheer was faked, or if Stark was faking the fake cheer, he was laying it so thick.
But Rogers retreated, confused, as Iron Man made his way to Doctor Banner and easily started a conversation about Gamma Rays.
“Nat,” Clint whispered to attract her attention. When he was sure she had her eyes on him, he pointed discreetly at Captain Rogers. In his hands, was the same sparkly thing all of them sported.
She had much to discuss with Darcy, as soon as she visited again.
“-Positive. Agent’s, we’ve tracked the cube- And Loki! 79% match,” barked Fury.
Later. Not now.
“We have now received reports of a wormhole opening in New York… -Sources say- … The disaster that hit New York -... Reports of a creature called The Hulk - … Tony Stark-”
“You should come to Stark Tower,” Tony offhandedly said, as they watched Loki and Thor depart with the Tesseract.
“What?” Bruce looked at him confused. He wasn’t… he wasn’t really serious, was he?
“Sorry, Stark,” Natasha and Clint were already apologizing, “Fury wants us to do something for him for now. But soon, as soon as we’re done.”
“Great! I’m counting on it! What about you, Rogers? We’ve got all the toys and lots of fun.”
Captain Rogers promised he’d join at a later date, and yet Stark didn’t sound very disappointed. What had he missed?
When everyone was gone, there was just him and Tony in his very expensive car.
“You’re going to love it at the Tower.” Oh, he was serious. “We’ve got the best, even Dr Foster said so.”
“Dr Foster?” asked Bruce, bewildered. “What’s Dr Foster got to do with anything?”
“She’s coming to the lab by tomorrow,” Stark revealed conspiratorially. “I’ve confirmed it with her intern. It’s going to be just great.” He sniggered. It was like Tony was privy to some big secret no one else knew about.
Maybe he was.
“What’s wrong with you, guys?” Darcy wondered for the second time that day.
Pietro and Wanda had been resolutely silent in the last few days, but today they were awfully stubborn about not talking about what was eating them on the inside out.
How do you help someone if you can’t even guess what the problem is?
She sighed deeply and her tails lowered. They’d been twitchy lately, more than usual. And she’d suffered all the itches along her tailbone. Again. She wondered if it was about time for an upgrade.
Wanda dropped another pebble in the river. Instead of stepping like it usually did, it sunk straight away. Pietro’s followed suit.
“Okay, now. I’ve been patient and understanding, but if you don’t tell me what’s wrong I won’t know how to fix it!” she almost shouted.
Pietro’s face soured and Wanda’s lips thinned into a harsh line.
“Stark,” mumbled Wanda, in the end.
“...Stark?” What about Stark?
“We’ve seen the New York coverage,” choked out Pietro, clenching his fist. “Always Stark.”
The Carbuncle’s head lowered. Almost ten years, and still she hadn’t managed to help them let go. “Oh guys, I’ve told you before, it-”
“That is not the problem,” Wanda said with finality. “We saw something on his arm. A curious pendant. It was your Stones, Mama. You betrayed us for Stark”
“Whoa there!” Darcy jumped. “No one has betrayed anyone. Wanda, Pietro, I understand that you suffered, but I’ve told you again and again.”
“It’s always Stark, Stark and Stark taking things from us.”
“Taking things? Honey, no! I’m not leaving you, ever. And Stark is not the enemy. How can you blame the creator of the gun instead of those who used it? Wanda, Pietro, please!”
“Please helps nothing!” The boy screamed at her. “You’re siding with Stark, you shouldn’t side with Stark. You’re our Mother, not his !”
“Maybe she isn’t,” whispered Wanda.
“...What?” This wasn’t happening. This was a ridiculous thing. For a second, Darcy hoped her obsidian would activate. She’d take her Opal. A nightmare was better than watching this unfold. “Are you serious with this, Wanda?”
Even Pietro looked genuinely shocked.
“You said you’d keep your distance if we asked,” Wanda took a fortifying breath. “I’m asking. Leave. Don’t come back.”
Pietro looked at his sister, and then back at the tiny creature. “Never.”
“Jane, my babies left me. I’m taking the day off.”
Hiding in the rooms Tony had specifically crafted for her was a great idea. Maybe here she could lick her wounds and nurse her bruised heart in peace.
Jarvis assured her no cams were in her rooms, so she could actually Shift and curl into a ball under the soft covers.
She couldn’t get herself to enjoy how nice the accomodation was.
Tony had gone all out for her. There was real grass, and a part of the floor was paved in stone, and the pillows were huge. She’d thank him later.
She wasn’t even pleased by the third tail that had started poking curiously from between her two fluffy ones. Nothing could bring her babies back. They’d been hers like all the others, and she already missed them so much.
She wailed and tightened her tails around her. Where had everything gone wrong? How?!
“Miss Lewis?” Jarvis called with his unfailingly polite voice. No cameras still didn’t mean no Jarvis. Which was fine, Jarvis was a peach.
“Miss Lewis?” he repeated, when she didn’t answer the first time. “Dr Foster is… screaming just outside the door. She threatens an intervention. It’s been two weeks since you’ve last spoken to anyone.” Two weeks? It… it certainly hurt as much as the first day.
Still, there was no point arguing with Jane. She’d just go to Tony and ask for an override code
“...Let her in, Jarvis.”
“DARCY! Where are you? Darcy, Darc- oh. You… you’ve got another tail, Darcy.” Jane’s lame comment was totally what she needed right now.
“Well spotted.”
Jane winced. “I’m sorry, but I was really worried. I was about to go to Tony if this failed. He’s yet to see you, and you need to meet Bruce, still! Now, I’m not a fan of Stark, I mean, not a big fan, he’s trying to steal you away-” Her ears flattened in irritation but Jane continued. “But Bruce is absolutely amazing. I mean, he’s going to be one of your favourites too, I’m su-” Okay. That was enough.
“WHY IS EVERYBODY FIGHTING OVER WHO GETS THE MOST LOVE?!” Darcy exploded. Jane shut up immediately.
“IS IT THAT HARD TO BELIEVE THAT I MIGHT BE ABLE TO LOVE ALL OF YOU INDEPENDENTLY OF HOW MANY PEOPLE I LOVE?! DOES THERE NEED TO BE A FAVOURITE?! AND WHO’S STEALING WHAT, EXACTLY?” Jane was already silent, but Darcy couldn’t stop. It was a flood, a horrible flood of anger she hadn’t realized she was feeling.
“I love you all, unconditionally. You’re my family. I LOVE YOU. What is wrong with it!” she panted. She was completely spent. She felt a bit better, but so tired. She crawled under the covers until she was completely covered. She just wanted to sleep.
“Is everything alright in here?” A man poked into the room from the wrong side, as if he’d just been passing by and thought at least thrice before stepping in. He still hadn’t.
“Oh, yes,” smiled Janey. “Darcy’s just letting it all out, finally. She needed to vent a bit.”
“...Who’s Darcy?”
The Shape-shifter grumbled from the bed. A hand was suddenly on her head, and the covers were lightly yanked from over her.
“Darcy, meet Bruce. Bruce, this is our Darcy.” Darcy hissed at Jane, something she had never ever done to a human before, and the man gasped.
“...You’re the horned talking cat from my dream!” The man with spectacles exclaimed.
Her ears perked. “Bruce! Hi! How’s the Other Guy??”
Jane Foster was good people.
Darcy still hadn’t completely forgiven her, but she still loved her dear friend. And the astrophysicist was right.
In the following weeks, with the Twins still incommunicado, Clint and Natasha on a mission and Steve that was still followed on sight so he wasn’t ‘risking it’, Tony and Bruce were a balm to her soul.
Tony was his boisterous, loud self, as usual. Every day he thought of something new and interesting, and he shared. He shared everything, from ideas to gifts to laughs. He was brilliantly goofy in his own way. At night, however, when the ghosts of the Wormhole came to haunt him, when he was afraid to sleep, he’d come find her and they’d drink something warm together. Or she’d bake. Of course, she kept reminding him that as a Magic Carbuncle she would just keep the nightmares away for him, but he insisted on this weird ritual. Possibly because it helped her more than him.
Bruce was the complete opposite. He was calm and soft-spoken. No less intelligent, of course, but he was used to his space and his privacy, so while he was the best kind of company when you needed some ‘off time’, he tired of people extremely fast.
He was always game for an intellectual conversation, though, and Darcy found herself discussing esoterism with him more often than not.
Considering the fact that she’d met him only once before being actually introduced in the real life, she was surprised of how accepting he’d been of her and her inhumanity.
“Do you live forever?” Darcy shrugged. “I dunno. We’ve never wondered. We can become stone though, does that help?”
“...Not really,” smiled Bruce, “I wonder what a C-14 dating would tell us about you, actually.”
She tensed. “Yeah, eh… let’s… how about we don’t try it?”
Dr Bruce Banner actually snorted at that. “Yeah, let’s not.”
Spending time in the Tower with her friends was amazing. It was exactly what Darcy wanted in life. Her friends, happy and together. She could even forget the ‘safe from harm’ part, as superheroes were wont to bruise often.
Still, she made a point to be extra careful when looking for Nightmares. She had to step up her game if she wanted to keep up with ‘The Avengers’.
And it was then that she saw it again. Bucky’s blue streak.
It flew over her head, straight as an arrow and fast as a bullet.
She gave chase, but as soon as she was about to enter it, it vanished.
She shook her head. Again? Really?
But then she froze. Because no less than three miles from where the streak had disappeared, was Steve’s golden hue.
She had to warn him.
“Ow, ow ow ow ow.” The Amazing Hawkeye wasn’t feeling overly amazing right now. And he was even in front of a public. Of colleagues. His Avengers colleagues. Joy.
Agent Marks snorted as the rest of the team finally managed to dislodge his gurney from the jet he’d been literally strapped into. “Gently, guys, wouldn’t want to hurt the Amazing Hawkeye, would we?” snickered the woman, patting him harshly on the shoulder.
“SHIT!” He screamed. That thing fucking hurt. Tony Stark actually winced as well.
“Sorry,” Beth winced. “Anyways, here’s your escort, we’re leaving for Guatemala now, okay?”
Clint grumbled. Guatemala was a mission he’d been gunning for since last month. And now this. He looked at his limp arm blocked in a cast. If only they’d let him take his bracelet on the field, but nope. That one was locked safely on the freakin’ bolthole Nat insisted they leave their shit in. Yay.
Tony grabbed the gurney and peered at him from above. “Can you walk or shall I lead this thing to medical?”
In response, Clint jumped out of the thing and kicked it. “Thought so,” laughed Stark.
“Nice hole.” He whistled, impressed.
The place was huge. Like, really huge. “So,” was saying Stark. “I’ll start with your room and then medical, yeah? You’ll want to leave the duffel bag. Mind you, the lady will probably complain that we should have done medical first, but if you still have those fancy Gems of yours shouldn’t be a problem.” He was so not going to tell Stark, lest he was actually dragged to the med bay right now.
“And here’s the elevator, you know? Just state your floor and Jarvis will take you there.”
“Nice ventilation system.” Shit. That was probably a weird compliment to make, right?
But Stark laughed harder. “Oh yeah, she knew you’d like it. Some of it she booby-trapped, though, so careful with those.” She who?
“And. Here’s your room. Right beside your twin spyssassin’s one.” Natasha’s?
“WHAT’S HE DOING DOWN THERE?!” Could Tony Stark actually squeal like a girl? He could. Unless that was Jarvis. A tiny whirlwind of a brunette was suddenly standing between them and the door, her hands full of fabric strips.
“Now, see here…”
“The room’s not ready!” wailed the girl. “I need everything to be perfect. Hi Clint,” she smiled at him.
“Tony, take him for a tour, but don’t stand here.”
“But Darcy!” Stark complained. Darcy? His eyes zeroed on her straight away. “I wanted to settle him down before he was strapped down by the docs-!” Clint winced. Oh no.
‘Darcy’ blinked. “Doctors?” she rounded on him. “Now what did you do, Clint? Good Quetzal, why is your arm bent like that and where is your bracelet , young man?”
If anyone else asked, he’d say… No, he would totally say he went for the hug first, ignoring the pain in his arm. He hugged her fiercely with only one arm, burying his face in her hair and then she was holding him just as strong.
Then she slapped his hurting shoulder. Then kissed his head. While she was still close to him. “Let me fix you, you dork,” she smiled, and put a hand on his neck.
The bones started stitching themselves right away. “That’s… still the most uncomfortable feeling, Darcy.”
“Shut up or I’ll have Tony knock you out this instant.”
The only consolation , Natasha thought, was that Clint was safe.
It was hard to believe that almost two years had passed from the moment a wormhole opened into the sky and almost nuked Manhattan.
Two years of normal business, which she’d thought boring a few days ago, but now she’d trade over. Immediately.
Natasha Romanoff had been played by SHIELD, Hydra, whatever it was called.
And so had Clint.
And Steve.
And all of the Avengers.
“Can’t say I didn’t expect it,” sighed Steve from Sam Wilson’s bathroom.
“You did?” She couldn’t say she wasn’t surprised.
“Mh,” Steve nodded. “Darcy’s always been signalling me Bucky’s position whenever he popped out in her Dream World, and they always matched with some weird SHIELD mission or another.”
Huh. That was… convenient. “How long have you known Darcy?” she asked instead.
“...I don’t know, eighty years? Sometimes it seems longer. She was my only companion when I was frozen down there.”
Natasha nodded. She could relate. “She was my only companion too, even when I was brainwashed into compliance.”
“Did she get you out?”
The spy nodded again. “Yeah. Can say that since Rumlow went berserk on Clint in the PEGASUS facility, I’ve never left the Obsidian she gave me.”
Steve’s eyes were now contemplative. “The obsidian’s against mind control, right?”
Oh, Steve, what in the world are you going to do now?
Something was wrong.
She felt it in her bones, down to her bushy tails. But what was she going to say? ‘Oh hey guys, my bones are telling me something is wrong but not even in the fucking Dream world there’s anything out of place!’ Yeah no.
So Darcy contented herself with being grumpy the whole day.
“Hey, Darce!” Clint dropped from the vents behind her. “We’re having movie night tonight. Nat should be calling soon.” Oh. That was nice. Maybe she could even get some shuteye if they picked something relaxing.
“Sounds great. I’ll drag in the bosslady later.”
“You got it!”
Movie night was always nice. Tony and Clint squabbled a bit, but it was all in great fun.
Tonight they were watching Gone with the Wind, to the secret joy of Tony and to Darcy’s undisguised horror. Yep, she was going to sleep this thing off.
She Shifted into her normal, fluffy form, waited for Bruce to settle on the couch, took aim and pounced straight into his lap. He immediately started petting her without thinking.
This was the life.
A very angry Mermaid later, Darcy still wasn’t satisfied.
It couldn’t be it. It just couldn’t be. But Bucky’s streak wasn’t there at all, neither were Steve’s and Nat’s. Her other people were safely at the Tower. What el-
Her insides froze and ice was poured all over her.
Oh, Quetzal. Her babies.
She floated as fast as she could in absolute panic. It wasn’t it. It couldn’t be it. Not her babies.
She felt exactly like that time with Clint, and that time it hadn’t ended especially well.
She prayed to all of the old Gods and some of the new ones, Thor included, to let her get to them on time.
Their streak was still intact. White and shiny, it was still real and amazing.
She knew she had promised to let them go… and she would… once she was sure they were safe.
So with a resigned yet expectant noise, Darcy dove in.
The feeling of sickness assaulted her from moment one, and she had to put her paws on her muzzle before she choked on the air.
“Wanda? Pietro?” she cried out urgently. Where were they?
“Wandaaa? Pietrooo?” she called, and called, and called.
Until they answered.
It was Wanda. But it didn’t look like Wanda.
She was stick-thin, dressed in a potato sack, and a weird red energy was all over her. Her precious girl spasmed and dry heaved on the floor of whatever this was.
“WANDA!” In a flash she was at her side, patting her girl gently. The young woman gurgled something incoherent and fell to the ground.
Laying on his side to her right, was a bettered Pietro, convulsing and whining.
“What happened here?” she was almost in tears. What in the world.
Okay, first thing first. Patch the body up, then clear the mind.
Thus the little Carbuncle set herself to work, biting Pietro to keep him still and gently holding Wanda’s head as she heaved.
When she was done, they didn’t look much better, but it was the best she could do until their bones fixed themselves up on their own. This sucked so hard.
“You’re… back.” Wanda was… crying?
“Oh, honey, no. Why are you crying? It’s alright,” she patted her head.
“It’s not,” said Pietro. “We’re sorry. We were wrong. Hate blinded us, and it wasn’t fair to take it out on you.”
“We were… jealous.” It physically hurt them to say it, Darcy could see. They were always prideful little shrimps.
“It’s alright, you guys,” she smiled. “It’s gonna be alright.”
“It’s not.” Wanda choked. It.. It wasn’t? “We did something terrible and now we’re going to die.”
What. “What?”
“We agreed to enter List’s experimentations with the Front of Liberation of Sokovia.”
The Front? They’d decided peaceful protests were going to be their only answer. What had they done in these two years!
“We were angry,” Pietro was crying too. “We thought we knew best. But now we’re prisoners and they’re going to send us to torture chamber again.”
“We’re so sorry, Mama.”
Torture? On her kids?! “Where are you. Tell me everything. Tell me now.”
“We need to leave now-!”
“We don’t even know the s-!”
“They said they have it under control-!”
She came to a full grown row in the Tower’s Common Room.
“What?”
“Darcy! Nat sent us a message, they’re going to blow up SHIELD” Clint was going spare.
“WHAT!”
“Yes, apparently SHIELD was Hydra all along and Nat and Cap are going to destroy it all with Maria. From the inside. They need backup!”
“No they don’t!” repeated Jane heatedly. “Nat specifically said you are not to intervene, instead you have to send medical backup because they want immediate evac to the Tower once shit is over. This is what you have to do.”
Tony and Bruce were nodding alongside her. “Bruce already agreed to get on site with the evac team. It’s the best we can do, wait here and don’t provoke Hydra. For now!” Tony hastily added in front of Clint’s mutinous face. “Once Romanoff’s cover piece is done, we’ll simply do it our way. Deal?”
“...No deal.” Oh, Clint. “Waiting two days is not my style. I’ll never be able to wait this long.”
“You’re a sniper!” Stark remarked incredulously. “Waiting is your job!”
“On a mission.” Clint spelled quickly. “I’m good at my job, but this is not my job. This is my friend needing me.”
“She doesn’t need you, right now,” Bruce tried reasonably, but no one heard him. Not really.
But this situation had made her remember her babies from the other side of the world.
“Clint…” He turned to her furiously. “I might... need your help. And Tony’s. Like big time.”
The focus of the room shifted to her “What do you mean, Darcy?” voiced Jane.
“I… I might have a couple of kids that I raised in Sokovia and they were really cute but one of Stark’s missile fell on their house and killed their parents so they were like really resentful but then I raised them and taught them how to live off the streets and they were happy and joyful and content and it was fine but then it wasn’t fine and they kinda hated you and so we parted ways but now they’ve been captured by Hydra and right now they’re being experimented on and I know where they are so please help?” She actually said that in one breath. She was proud.
Clint frowned. “Okay, slower. Start from the beginning.”
Natasha wasn’t feeling guilty about leaving Steve and Sam in the hands of DC’s Hospital.
When she’d asked an Evac Team, Tony had pulled all the stops and got the best available right at their disposal. Obviously, Steve Grant Rogers had gone and pulled some stupid stunt, and by the time they pulled him out of the Potomac, Stark’s unit was long gone, busy evacuating the still loyal Agents.
So everyone had gone but Steve and, by extension, her and new recruit Sam Wilson.
Typical Rogers.
But she wasn’t merciless. She had actually left Steve her bracelet, since his was completely mangled (the black stone wasn’t there anymore, the ends of the thing were all frayed and the green stone was only mildly vibrant). She’d ask Darcy to replace it, or maybe Tony had some spares.
“You can leave him with me, you know?” Sam assured her sleepily, from the chair he was sitting on.
“Yes, I do,” she nodded. “I’m going to check something in New York. Get Stark to move you.”
“He’s a phone call away,” rebuked Sam, confused.
“Some things you need to do in person.” was all she said.
For now, she was not going to dwell on why she would need to check on all of them in the flesh instead of working on her new cover identities like she’d been taught to.
Sam seemed to understand and backed off.
The Russian spy turned on her heels and left.
Six hours later she was in Manhattan, right in front of the Tower.
“Welcome, Miss Romanoff,” JARVIS stated politely as she stepped into the elevator.
“Thanks, JARVIS, where’s everyone?”
“They are in Dr Foster’s Lab, Miss Romanoff.”
“Take me there.”
“As you wish.”
Stepping into Jane Foster’s lab was like entering the thin no man’s land between two polar opposite societies.
One side was an actual mess of cables and equipment and probably a Roomba’s wet dream, dust and lint colliding with each other to create their own ecosystem of dirt and… Was that a lint owl?
The other side was completely spotless, with stacks and stacks of neatly lined papers all on top of each other, not a dust speck in sight.
Huddled in the smack middle of it, their heads so close they could almost touch, completely focused on a screen, were the astrophysicist, her intern and Bruce Banner.
Bruce noticed her first, “Natasha!” Was it her imagination, or was his voice a little higher?
The intern didn’t even turn, her face focused on whatever they’d been watching a second ago. Jane Foster, however, tensed, and Natasha just knew something was wrong.
“Hello, everyone. Where’s Tony?” she asked with fake nonchalance.
“Not here.” Jane Foster, bless you. The hat-wearing intern smacked her hands on her face and so did Bruce.
“And where is he exactly?”
By now, the young woman had stopped any pretense of paying attention to the video and was now bodily blocking her from her friend. “We don’t know, right, Jane?” The girl was actually shaking Foster’s shoulders. The woman was nodding quickly.
“Okay,” she smiled easily, her lips thin. They should try harder with her, really. The tiny girl was good, but Foster needed to get a grip. Not that she was going to complain. All the better for her, after all.
“Hey, Darcy?” Clint’s voice was heard from the video feed and Natasha’s eyebrows rose to her hairline. ‘Darcy’ coughed loudly. “We got your friends safe on the Quinjet, we’re blasting this Hydra Hideout sky high and then be home in a few hours. They say ‘hi’, by the way.”
The spy’s eyebrows had reached her hairline before scrunching back in an angry frown. “Is this how you rest and recuperate, Clint?”
There was a crashing sound, a muffled curse, a girlish giggle and the feed was cut.
Natasha felt herself take very deep breaths. She had to be more tired than she thought, because she could have sworn she just heard ‘Hydra Hideout’. “So, does anyone feel like explaining what just happened while Steve and I were getting ourselves blown up?”
Everyone in the room winced. Bruce Banner grimaced.
She rounded on him. She didn’t say anything, just raised her eyebrow expectantly.
Bruce sighed. “They left for Sokovia a couple of days ago. There was a secret Hydra Hideout in Strucker’s castle they needed to deal with.” It was like a painfully slow monotone recap of a soap opera, watching Banner look for the most politically correct terms to use not to anger her. It exacerbated her irritation even more. “They are dealing with a human experimentation ring, but should be just done by now and bring the Maximoff Twins safely here.”
She frowned. “Who’s the Maximoff Twins?”
More twittering and tattering coursed through the trio as they debated what exactly to tell her. “I’ve just blown my home to hell for the foreseeable future, I’m not in the mood for games.”
The tiny intern stepped out then, straightening her chin. “Pietro and Wanda are my kids. Now, I just don’t want you to misunderstand. Clint and Tony didn’t leave for kick and giggles. My babies were being experimented on. Just like you’ve been-” Natasha inhaled sharply. “Just like everyone here was, to an extent. I couldn’t leave them there. I asked them to leave. And I didn’t leave them without protection, okay? I even gave them two emeralds to take with them, and those are bitches to charge. They need twice the energy you’d need for an Opal and last only up to a week, which is really stu-” she cut herself off. She coughed. “So, uhm, if you’re trying to blame anyone… blame me.”
“There’s been enough blaming to go around,” supplied Dr Banner. “They’ll be home soon, then we can all chew each other out.”
“Jane’s not edible,” blurted Darcy mechanically. “I spent too much time fattening her up.”
Natasha’s lips twitched upwards involuntarily, and Darcy smiled back tentatively.
Darcy had explained to him exactly why the Wonder Twins here might not want to stay too close to him, kinda, but this was getting a bit much.
Hawkguy was in the cockpit, steering the Quinjet like a pro and he was left with a couple of kids that had taken a seat as far as possible from him and were steadfastly ignoring him.
“We’ll be at the Tower in about ten minutes, crew,” stated birdman cheerfully.
“Oh, thank God,” he breathed.
The kids agreed with him, probably, because the boy patted the girl’s hand and the girl whispered something very similar to ‘Mama’. And Tony should really stop asking because this was none of his business but…
“Mama?”
Maximoff One’s lips pursed, but the sister looked him in the eye. “I meant Darcy.”
He actually knew that. Maybe. He’d guessed. “Cool, that’s cool. She’s… she’s kind of something, right? Tiny and fluffy but packs a punch.”
“You were punched?” Maximoff One found it funny, his heavily accented voice laced with humour. He was surprised their English was any good, actually.
“I… Once… Or twice.”
“Make it more!” laughed Birdbrawn from the cockpit.
“Let’s see how much you laugh as soon as we land!” snarked Tony then. “Your spyssassin twin is there waiting for you, huh?”
Barton clicked his mouth shut.
“Spyssassin?” mouthed fast-boy.
They had not much time to really break the ice, and Tony was certain they would have, eventually, because he was a totally awesome guy with great personality, because they landed soon after.
Bruce was there to intercept them. “You know you should go to a real med bay, right?” he huffed while he inspected them critically.
“We’re fine, Brucie-Bear!” Tony laughed. “Not a scratch on us, worry about the kids.”
As soon as he actually said that, a flash of red passed by him and stopped right behind Bruce. “Is Clint okay?” Bruce jumped a bit. “Oh, oh yeah, sure, there’s actually not a scrape on him.”
“Excellent.”
Next thing he knew, Birdbrain was on his back, howling murder. “Nat, ow! Stop! God! I’m okay. Please! OW! Not okay anymore!”
Tony winced in sympathy. So glad it wasn’t him. “And don’t think I’m done with you either, Stark!”
Was it hotter outside? Colder? Maybe?
“Let’s get inside, yeah?” He wasn’t beating a hasty retreat. It was just regrouping for later.
Foster was in the Common Room, wrapped in a blanket and blowing softly on what looked like coffee.
“Coffee!” Tony shouted jubilantly.
Twin one and Twin two, who had entered the room with thinly disguised hopeful expressions, stopped “Who are you?”
To her credit, Thor’s ladylove didn’t bat an eye. “You must be Pietro and Wanda! Darcy’s talked a lot about you. Actually, all the time. She should be here any momen-”
“-Absolutely starved, JARVIS, starved! I need the kitchen free for the next few hours, I need to cook and bake for twelv-” The mighty Carbuncle stopped in her tracks, stared at Tony, and then at the kids. “PIETRO! WANDA!” She screamed euphorically, making a sound only dogs could hear, probably. Could human cords reach that high?
And then he was being toppled over by the tiny terror trying to reach for her spawns.
Jane Foster helped him stand up again. “You get used to it,” she assured.
Steve Rogers was the absolute legend. The selfless kind of hero you would learn everything about when you were a kid, because he was that inspiring. From the sick kid from Brooklyn to Captain America and his Howling Commandos.
Then, in case you actually met your hero, you would realize the Legend doesn’t even come close to the Man.
That was before you learnt that Steve Rogers was an absolute troll and enjoyed every second of it.
And still, Sam Wilson meant it when he said he would follow the man anywhere.
He’d been getting emotionally ready to leave on a mad chase for Barnes the moment Steve told him the Winter Soldier was Bucky. He both dreaded and expected it.
So when Steve was finally released from the hospital, he waited patiently by his car to hear the words ‘I’ve got a lead’. What he heard instead, was that they were going to Stark Tower.
“You serious, man?” he just had to ask.
“Yes. Bucky’s not ready to be found, but he’s safe. For now, we’re going to Stark and wait there.”
“...Okay, cool.”
Well, Steve wasn’t wrong when he said the Tower kinda looked like a big dick, but he wasn’t going to complain about free housing, man. Not with Stark, at least. He still hadn’t unpacked.
The Avengers facilities were also more… inhabited than he’d expected.
He didn’t mean the team of techs and doctors that worked there, or even the part of SI employees.
No, he meant the actual people living in the private compound. Natasha, Hawkeye, the Hulk he could understand, he could even throw in Thor’s lady Jane because of course you’d keep family, but he was feeling a bit lost on the number of people that lived and strolled freely in the house.
Like... the girl in red that would move items around with her mind and her very fast twin.
“...Hello?” the young woman lost her concentration and the plates she was setting on the table dropped. Thankfully, her brother was really fast, and the table was set right away.
“That’s seriously cool,” he nodded. The twins smiled, and in the back of his mind, Sam wondered if having some kind of flashy gig was going to be the norm around here. It probably was.
“Do you need help with the food?”
The girl shook her head. “Mama’s got this, don’t worry.”
‘Mama’. Okay, cool. Slavic accent and another person he hadn’t met here. He just hoped ‘Mama’s’ cooking was more human than Steve’s. The man was a great man, but great cook he was not ( ‘back in my days we’d eat just about anything without complaining,’ yeah right) .
“Mama’s totally got this!” a bright voice cheerfully added. “But Mama would love it if someone helped her with getting all of this on the table! Oh, hey!”
A dark, curly head materialized from what was bound to be the kitchen. “Hi! Sorry can’t chat, but you can help Pietro and Wanda set the food on the table. Jarvis, please start pinging everyone for dinner, I’ll hit the Science!Band” She even airquoted ‘science band’.
“As you wish, Miss Lewis,” the disembodied voice Stark had warned him about confirmed.
“You’re a peach, Jarvis. Nice to meet you, Falcon dude!” she hollered as she disappeared into the elevator. Great, so now he was at disadvantage with the girl.
He put himself to work with Wanda and Pietro, when Steve came back in.
“Hey Sam, did you settle in properly?”
“Yeah sure,” he nodded. He still hadn’t seen his whole room. “Here, Cap. Take these.” And handed him a couple of Beer bottles.
A couple of minutes later the food was ready, he and Cap were treating themselves to a beer when the girl was back, with Tony Stark and… Jane Foster? in tow.
“Oh my Quetzal, Steve, you’re huge!” screamed the lady. Steve spat out his beer, loudly.
He wasn’t going to laugh. Nope. Stark was already howling enough for two.
“I’m sorry about earlier, dude, didn’t introduce myself and anything” the girl continued, patting Captain America soundly on the back. “You must be Sam. I’m Darcy.”
The Great Carbuncle yawned as she swept around her Dream World.
Her domain was peaceful for another day.
She gazed lovingly at her friend’s colors, sleeping peacefully in the Tower, and then Bucky’s blue, shimmering serenely a bit further ahead.
Darcy felt extremely accomplished.
This was exactly what she wanted, what she hoped to achieve.
This was the life. Her life.
After seven hundred years, she was finally home.