Chapter Text
Darcy is starting to feel ignored. Not that she has any real right to, or anything, but. She figures if you give a guy cookies and then he carries you across the city in his giant and majorly ripped arms, there must be at least some kind of bond going on there. A friendly one, of course. Because if anything, they’re friends.
But if they’re friends, which Darcy has been kind of starting to think they are, because hello, cookies and carrying, one would think Hulk wouldn’t be giving her the cold shoulder. Not that they’ve seen each other outside of two instances, and not that they have any sort of regular meeting pattern going on, but…COOKIES, DAMN IT. Giving a man baked goods means something, doesn’t it? She’s pretty sure she saw something about giving a guy banana bread on that show Love Bites, but no wait that’d been romantic stuff and this was definitely not a romantic situation. Hulk is a giant green dude, who is her friend.
But then where the fuck is he. Seriously, worst friend ever. She has no idea how to find him, so for the first week after the cookie incident she just kind of stayed up watching TV, glancing over at the window near the fire escape to see if he’d pop up. After the second week, she’d given that up. Now it’s well into the fourth week an irritatingly sunny Wednesday morning, and Darcy’s stewing.
“Who does he think he is, anyway?” Darcy grouches, stalking over to Jane and slamming the printed test results down next to her. “The guy just waltzes onto my fire escape, then carries me across the city to pick you up—”
“You said you asked him to do that.”
“—and leaves without even saying goodbye!” Darcy hoists herself up onto the lab table to angrily swing her legs and glare at the floor. “Seriously, he just puts me down on the sidewalk and leaps off into the night without so much as a ‘thanks for the cookies, Bakery Goddess’ or even just a ‘had a great time, soft pretty Darcy’. The nerve!”
“You’re acting like a jilted lover,” Jane says evenly, and Darcy sputters.
“I am not!”
“You are, and I’m busy,” Jane says, bent over a mess of equation-covered papers and scribbling furiously. Every so often she glances up at her laptop screen, but never at Darcy. “Can’t you go listen to your iPod or rant about this on myspace or something?”
Darcy stares at her boss. “Wow. Wow. Okay, um, there are so many things wrong with what you just said, I’m not even going to go near it.” Her resolve lasts about half a second. “Really, Jane? Myspace?” She hops off the table. So much disconnect from reality is unsettling, even for Darcy, who has on more than one occasion been called the Queen of Crazyville. “Also, my iPod broke during that alien attack a month ago. Low blow, Jane. You know my beloved Alejandro is lost to me forever.”
Jane doesn’t reply. Darcy takes this to mean that Jane has entered Science Land, and will not be emerging until she gets the results she wants or until the lab catches on fire. Actually, Darcy amends, Jane would probably stay behind and try to salvage her work in the event of a fire.
Speaking of fires, maybe if she starts one, Hulk will come swooping in to her rescue?
She stamps the idea out before it can take root. Crazy stalkery behavior is not okay. Life-threatening crazy stalkery behavior isn’t, anyway. And starting a fire is waaaayy over that line. Way over. And Jane would kill her, if Darcy didn’t kill herself in the process.
…Darcy decides she really needs a new hobby. And one that’s not baking, because if she bakes anything she’ll just wind up leaving it on the fire escape in the hopes that the smell will attract a Hulk. (Which it doesn’t. She’s already tried that a few times, during the second week, and the only thing it’d attracted was wild animals. And not the kind that are big and green and have rippling biceps the size of her torso.)
Yeah, Darcy really needs that new hobby.
Knitting seems as good as any recreational activity to take up. It’s supposed to be relaxing, right? Expecting a zen experience that will yield scarves and socks and sweaters, Darcy buys the needles and yarn required (which, ouch her wallet does not take kindly to) and settles down with the internet to figure out this knitting thing.
Two hours later, she has what is more or less a pre-moth-eaten scrap of scarf. It is possibly the ugliest thing Darcy has ever seen. The stitches are all wonky, and she can fit several fingers at once through some of the holes.
“I should burn you,” Darcy says to it, half (okay, maybe a little more than half) expecting her hideous creation to come alive in a Frankenstein-esque manner. It doesn’t. She’s not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed—if it had come alive, she would’ve at least had someone to talk to.
Instead, she takes out the needles and starts picking her failed project apart. When she’s finished, the unraveled yarn lies in a sad heap on the coffee table. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere for her to find, if she feels like looking. She doesn’t.
Coffee. She needs coffee.
There’s a little coffee shop around the corner from her apartment. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall place, and Darcy appreciates the lack of both hipsters and harried businessmen. The place is quiet, mostly surviving off its regular customers, one of whom is Darcy. Technically Jane is also a regular customer, but since Darcy is the one who buys her coffee, she’s never actually set foot in the place. Darcy kind of likes that. Jane is crazyawesome, and Darcy loves sharing an apartment and workspace with her best friend, but it’s nice to have a place of her own.
Which is why it feels like she’s stepped onto an alien planet when she sees Mr. Stark ordering an espresso at the beat-up wooden counter. She’s almost sure she’s hallucinating at first, but then he turns around, gives her the up-and-down, and smirks.
“Take a picture,” he says. “It’ll last longer.”
Yep, that’s definitely Tony Stark, billionaire playboy extraordinaire. Darcy has always wanted to hear his sass in person. Now, however, she has something else on the brain.
Because, see, Tony Stark is Iron Man, and Iron Man is an Avenger, and you know who else is an Avenger? A certain green-skinned giant who’s been avoiding Darcy for three weeks.
She opens her mouth to say something, to ask where Hulk is, to ask if he’s said anything about her, anything—and then realizes that showing interest in a guy generally perceived as a ruthless smashing machine is probably not good for establishing her sanity, tenuous though it may be. She closes her mouth again.
“Ah, speechless. Don’t worry, I tend to have that effect on people.”
Darcy snorts. “No worries here. I am completely worry-free.” She steps up to the counter and orders her usual, then settles back to wait.
“That’s a lie.”
“What?” It takes her brain a second to catch up, and then it starts whirring a mile a minute. What does he know? How does he know?
“You live in the Big Apple. No one here is ever stress free.” He gets handed his coffee, and leans back against the counter. “So tell me what’s eating you. I’ve got a few minutes to kill.”
Darcy’s right eyebrow creeps upwards.
“No, seriously. I’m all ears.” He takes a noisy sip of his coffee.
Darcy takes a deep breath. This needs to all come out at once—if she stops, she’ll freeze up. “Okay, so there’s this guy, and we’ve met up a couple times now, and he may have sort of saved my life once or twice, and then I fed him cookies, and he gave me a ride around the city. And now it’s been three weeks and he hasn’t gotten in touch.”
“Tried calling him?”
Darcy huffs, previous frustrations resurfacing. “Can’t. He doesn’t…um, have a phone. I don’t know where he lives, either.”
“What about his license plate number? You could track him through that.”
“Don’t remember it.” She rubs her left eye, feeling a weight settle over her shoulders.
“Well, what’s his name?”
Darcy blinks, too blanked out to notice the coffee being pushed her way by the barista. “Uh,” she says slowly. “Hank?”
Tony Stark looks vastly unimpressed. “You sure about that?”
Darcy nods. “Yep. Pretty sure. Hank Green.”
The corner of Tony Stark’s mouth twitches. “Honestly, kid, sounds to me like this guy was just some poser. Looking for a quick date. You know how boys are.”
The genius billionaire is so far off the mark it’s kind of hilarious. After some thought—hey, she’s been bored, okay?—Darcy is reasonably sure Hulk doesn’t want to get into anyone’s pants. And the thought of Hulk being a poser in any sense of the word is just, well. Ridiculous would be putting it mildly.
“He’s definitely not a ‘boy’,” Darcy snorts, holding back the laugh that’s bouncing around in her throat. “Trust me, this guy is…he’s massive, and older than me by at least a few years. And I don’t think he’s capable of being a poser. Yeah, no, definitely not.” She shakes her head, grinning.
When she looks back at Tony Stark, he’s giving her an assessing look. Like she’s a robot to deconstruct and understand through mechanics. “Maybe,” he says, as Darcy takes a sip of macchiato, “he’s got other stuff on his plate.”
“Maybe,” Darcy says. Tony Stark’s watch beeps, and he hisses in through his teeth.
“My Pepper’s here, and she’s cranky,” he says, tossing her a loose smile and a quick handshake. “Good luck with that boy of yours.”
Darcy rolls her eyes at his retreating back, then finds a seat off to the side of the shop to mull over what her life has become.