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For probably the six hundredth time in the last few months, she cursed herself for giving up her stable and predictable, if mind numbingly boring, job in Jane’s lab. She had been sucked in by Phil Coulson’s appraising glance and by the fact that, apparently, he had approved of what he had seen. Goddam her for testing well. Goddam those dance classes in her youth that had somehow gotten her through the basic physical tests. And double goddam the surge of pride she had felt when Phil Coulson had raised an eyebrow at her and told her she was better than fetching coffee and pop tarts.
“Are you sure this is necessary?” she asked again, nervously tapping her pen against the boardroom table.
Phil gave her a long and steady look that held just a hint of exasperation.
“I’m recommending you for training to join support for his team, Lewis,” he said evenly. “He gets a vote.”
So here she was, sitting in a small boardroom, waiting for Captain fucking America to decide if she was good enough to get trained to work for the Avengers.
The whole idea that the Avengers needed a ground team had seemed sort of crazy to her in the first place, but once she had gotten into her tactical training seminar, she realised that they had an entire team of point men. There was no one who’s primary job was to be gathering information, watching the pattern of the situation develop, assessing options, seeing the field as a whole. The more and more often the team got called out, the more they needed it.
She knew perfectly well that the only reason she had even been shortlisted was firstly because the team had agreed that a fresh agent was best. They didn’t exactly work like other SHIELD teams, so better to find someone without those ingrained habits. Secondly, she sometimes palled around with Thor. He had probably shouted something loud and overly formal about it that forced Coulson to roll his eyes and write down her name.
It wasn’t so much the meeting Captain America thing. It was more that she knew that this was going to end in a probably very polite thanks but, seriously? No. And the idea of having her inadequacies thoroughly documented before being rejected by Captain America was the absolute worst.
Once, when she was about 14, she had stolen one of her Mom’s cigarettes and snuck out of the house to smoke it. She had been wandering past the old movie theatre in town, trying to get the thing lit in a stiff breeze, when she had stopped, stock still. A vintage Captain America poster was staring back at her. The actual message of the poster was about buying war bonds, but she could swear that the disappointed and stern look on his face under the dramatic lettering that said “Don’t Let Hitler Win!” was aimed directly at her. She had immediately dropped the cigarette and run back home.
And now that same face was about to tell her that she wasn’t up to par to work for the Avengers.
She slunk low in her chair. Christ. She was going to let Hitler win. She could just feel it in her bones. He was going to come back from the dead and re-occupy Europe because she was such a fucking pathetic excuse for a SHIELD trainee and Captain America was going to give her the disappointed face.
Phil looked at her sideways.
“You know,” he said calmly, “You are really going to need to learn to get a handle on that inferiority complex of yours.”
All she managed in response was to gape at him stupidly for a moment, because the door opened, and Captain America walked in. She stood up, abruptly clamping her mouth closed and doing her best to look like a competent agent. It was hard though, because she had been imagining that face that had been lurking somewhere in her subconscious ever since puberty, popping up whenever she was about to make a bad decision. This man, in jeans and grey Henley with about three days’ worth of stubble on his chin, was definitely not that guy.
“Agent Coulson” he greeted Phil with a boyish grin, shaking his hand as Phil rose to greet him.
“Captain,” he responded with an almost giddy grin. Darcy blinked hard at the sight, “always a pleasure.”
And then Captain America turned his gaze on her. His eyebrows shot up abruptly.
“Miss Lewis?” he half stammered, casting a sideways glance at Phil.
Yep. Here we go. She thought to herself. But she forced herself to smile politely and extend her hand like there was a real point to this interview. “Captain Rogers,” she said, “I appreciate you taking the time to meet me.”
He took her hand a little gingerly, but his grip was warm and firm as her took her hand. He didn’t really shake it though, just held it for a moment, staring at her.
“You’re not what I expected,” he blurted unexpectedly.
She raised an eyebrow at him. He was less intimidating than she had expected. The unfortunate side effect of this was that as her star struck intimidation started to fade, she started to realise that he was still just holding her hand, looking at her like maybe Phil was playing some sort of joke on him. And, okay, maybe she had some insecurity about her skill level, but she had expected him to at least be nice about it. It was making her kind of angry.
“What exactly were you expecting, Captain?” she said in a clipped tone, pulling her hand away.
He grinned swiftly, “Phil didn’t tell me I was coming to meet you,” he said. “Usually his recruits are far less interesting that the woman who took down Thor.”
She turned to Phil, crossing her arms and glaring. He just shrugged with that little smile she had come to associate with him getting one over on someone.
“And how the hell do you know about that,” she asked, turning back to Captain Rogers.
“He’s got a picture of you and Jane in the common room at the Tower,” he explained easily. “And he likes to tell stories.”
“Oh,” she said, her irritation flagging at his logical explanation. “Well, perhaps we should move forward with the meeting then?” she suggested pointedly.
“Yes,” Phil stepped in smoothly, “Captain, you’ve had a look at the anonymized copies of Miss Lewis’s scores and aptitude tests, let’s start there, shall we?” He moved to sit down.
“No need,” Rogers said with a dismissive waive of his hand, not even moving towards a chair, “whatever we can do to get Miss Lewis up to speed as soon as possible Phil. She’s the one we want.”
Even Phil looked mildly surprised at that.
He cleared his throat. “I’m certainly glad we’ve found a trainee that you’ll consider Captain, but if you wouldn’t mind going through your decision process for my report?”
He nodded, but he was looking at her, not at Phil at all. She felt like she was 14 again, the focus of all of his intentions. But it was uncomfortably close to that fluttery feeling of being 14 with a crush rather than being 14 with an illicit cigarette.
“Your recruits are always talented Phil,” he said. “I looked at the reports, Miss Lewis is no different. The problem has always been finding someone who was going to be able to deal with the way we function. The sort of people that sign up for SHIELD like procedure and rules, we don’t have much interest in those.”
“You’re saying I’m a wild card?” Darcy interjected indignantly.
“I’m saying,” he said with a slow grin, “that you tased a god and he still calls you his shield sister. I’m interested to see how you’re going to deal with Tony Stark.”
“Fine,” said Phil with a hint of amusement, “I’ll put the paperwork through today. She’s still got to make it through SHIELD’s basic training, but she’s yours for whatever part of that training you and the team want to handle. I’ll be handling her support and logistics training myself.”
“Excellent. I look forward to working with you Miss Lewis. Phil,” he said with a nod and a grin, “next time don’t make me sit through so many pointless interviews before you make a real recommendation.”
“Just wanted to make sure you took my point,” Phil answered. “Thank you for your time Captain.”
There was a bit of a vacuum as he left the room. Darcy collapsed back into her seat, feeling like she’d just run a marathon or something. Phil was grinning at her.
“Are you going to stop debating the merits of your test scores now?” he asked almost jovially.
“Phil,” she said ignoring him entirely, “Did Captain America just hire me to run his support team? Is that what just happened?”
“Yes he did Miss Lewis. Don’t make me regret it.”
“Is that a veiled insinuation that maybe I should stop complaining about the physical training?”
“Yes Miss Lewis, but it wasn’t that veiled.”
+
+
By about noon the next day, she had received her new training schedule and a new security clearance. She was trying to ignore it. It had sunk in, somewhere along the line, that this was a hell of a lot of pressure and responsibility for a brand new recruit. She got the logic behind training someone from the ground up, she really did. But had Captain Rogers really put much thought into the sort of weigh he was tossing onto someone who could barely hit a target with any reliability yet?
Phil did, apparently, because he had blocked some simulator time into her afternoon when she knew she wasn’t due for it.
Of all of the changes that making the transition to Agent had brought, the simulator was the one thing she unreservedly loved about it. It was very cool tech, for one thing. The room was about the size of a football field but square, clean white and blinding when you first walked into it. But once you slipped into the wireless bodysuit and stuck on the helmet, you could boot up any of the thousands and thousands of training programs that had been programmed in, complete with full sensory emersion. You could feel the texture of the ground under your feet, the pressure of wind on your skin, the tactile sensation of anything you picked up. They were working on the smells, but they were never quite right. Plus, if you started moving too fast you could feel the slightly sickening disorientation and vertigo caused by the fact that the computer was changing the input so you went in a circle rather than a straight line into a wall.
She thought it was more about the control though. As soon as it had been clear that her aptitude was pointing towards coordination and tactics, her simulator time was upped and she started working her way through the ground team scenarios. If you watched carefully enough, if you paid enough attention to every piece of information that was coming at you, if you chose your team carefully, you could make the difference between victory and defeat. Life and death.
Today, she was sitting in a van, occasionally rocked by falling debris or an explosion from the battle raging outside. There was a 10 member SHIELD armed response team dealing with armed insurgents on the ground. She was responding to requests from the team leader for intel about tech, fortifications and positions almost absently. What was far more interesting was the side mission that had blinked across her screen. It seemed almost casual. Check out a message coming out of a nearby building that had triggered a watch word.
There had been a few others like it since she started the simulation. One had been some opportunistic looters at an arms cache. She notified local authorities. Another had been short wave chatter following the encounter. She tagged the location and made a system note to watch that none of the information went too far. Easily handled in the cleanup phase.
This message though. She couldn’t figure out why it had triggered an alarm. It was innocuous. Just a location tracking ping coming from a server. Totally normal in a crisis situation. Banks and large corporations checking to make sure their servers in the area were still online.
But this server wasn’t identifiable. So she started digging. The server was uncrackable from the outside. You’d need a hard line. She did, however, manage to go through the building’s security system to find the server ownership information. A quick cross reference against SHIELD databases brought up a link to a rogue terrorist cell. Running through recent alerts related to the group told her that the cell had been taken out. Records showed that they had been developing a program to hack nuclear launch protocols. Their information store, though, had never been located.
She was willing to bet dollars to donuts that she knew exactly what was in that highly secured server now. She was also willing to place serious money on the fact that whoever had just pinged its location was probably about to realise their asset before it could be destroyed.
“Commander, this is ground,” she patched through to the team leader. “I need one of your men for a side-mission. 15 minutes at most. Anderson is closest.”
“Denied, ground,” came the immediate stilted response. This was one of the reasons she liked it better when there was a real team in the simulator with her. One, the computer never got voices quite right and two, there was a real, rational person she could talk to. Ideally one that had worked with her before and would trust her.
She paused for half a second, considering explaining the situation.
“No time,” she muttered to herself, and exited the van door. She could see the graphics momentarily shift as she jumped to the ground, but they cleared up as she started to run.
Six minutes later, the drive was wiped, her hard line had been pulled and she was safely back in the van. The point team hadn’t even noticed her missing as they finished up with their objectives.
With a beep and a whirr, the simulation wound to a close and Darcy pulled off her helmet with a triumphant grin. She hurried out to check her scores, but found that the control room wasn’t empty.
“Agent Lewis,” it was Captain Rogers. If she hadn’t known any better, she could swear she was getting a once over in the skin tight black bodysuit.
“Captain,” she said with a challenging look, just in case. “Something I can do for you?”
“Actually yeah,” he said, pushing a chair out for her with a foot from where he sat. “I’m curious to know why you broke protocol and exited the van over one little secured server.”
“Did you have the data readouts up?” she asked, taking a seat and pulling off her gloves.
“No, just audio and visual. That’s all I ever get in a fight,” he said with a little shrug.
“Oh, well that explains it.” She said with some relief.
“Explains what?”
“I did a bit of digging. That secured server contained a program that could have started a nuclear war. Someone pinged it.”
“Pinged?” he asked.
“Tracing its location,” she clarified.
“Oh,” he said with a growing smile. “Good.”
“Good?” she was confused.
“S’gonna be pretty important that I trust your decisions in the field, I guess,” he said with a grin.
“Right,” she said, feeling that uneasy pressure creep up on her again.
“I’m also pretty glad that you don’t seem to care much for protocol.” He was leaning back in his chair, one hand scratching a bit absently at his still unshaven face.
“Why’s that,” she asked curiously.
“Because I’m about to ask if I can take you out for a drink,” he said, “And I’m pretty sure that’s against the rules.”
Darcy stared at him for a long moment.
“I think,” she said finally, “that some rules are there for a reason.” Without another word she stood up and walked towards the door.
“Won’t stop me from trying, Miss Lewis,” his voice followed her, low and certain as she left.
If she took a shower a few degrees colder than normal, who was going to tell on her?
+
+
“Great work today Lewis,” Barton slapped her on the shoulder as they walked out of the simulator, “awesome catch on that secondary staging ground.”
“Well if they ever actually develop x-ray specs I’ll probably be obsolete,” she said with a grin, “hardly had to keep my eye on the fight at all with you on the roof.”
“Gotta work to keep the call sign,” he said with a wink as he brushed past her.
She hurried to change, quickly pulling a jersey dress over her head so she could get back to the control room. The rest of the team had clearly breezed right through to change and head out, but Darcy always liked to look at the stats when it was fresh in her mind.
Captain Rogers was waiting for her by the door again.
She bit down on the corner of her lip to stop herself from smiling. It had become a sort of game, honestly. He hadn’t been kidding. All of the professionalism in the world hadn’t stopped him from asking her out every few days. To be honest, she thought she’d be upset if he ever did.
Still, she wasn’t sure she was ever going to say yes either. This was working. Her training was going well, she was working well with the team. When they were running simulations, the Captain was focused and responsive and listened to what she told him. When they weren’t though…
“Celebratory drink?” he asked as she approached him, “That a perfect 10 and 0 record in the simulator now.”
“Sure Captain,” she agreed with a sunny smile, “just let me round up the team.”
“One of these days Lewis, you’ll come around,” he said as he followed her into the control room.
“Oh yeah?” she said absently, scrolling through the recorded data, “right about the same time you move on to a new target right?”
After a moment, she realised that he hadn’t responded like he normally would, with a teasing comment, or a flirtatious remark.
She turned to look at him. He was looking at her, his hands shoved in his pockets, brows furrowed in confusion, or maybe apprehension.
“Captain?” she asked tentatively.
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” he asked, “that you’re a target? That I’m only in it for the chase?”
“Well,” she said carefully, “yes actually.” What else was she supposed to think? This was Captain America. He could have any woman in the country. He was also her superior officer. Both of those things created a power imbalance that strongly suggested he wasn’t looking for a mature and committed relationship from her.
“Well why in god’s name haven’t you reported me if you thought I was just…” he ran hand through his hair, “is this normal for you? Is there anyone else who is…” he looked livid and Darcy was having a very hard time following this conversation.
“Captain, just…take it down a notch okay?” she said in mild alarm, “no one is harassing me, not even you.”
He looked slightly mollified, but not much.
She sighed. “Look, I didn’t say anything about it because you clearly respect me and the job I’m learning to do. It’s not affecting the work. And it’s…it’s kind of nice, you know?”
“Nice?” he took a step towards her, he didn’t look angry anymore, but he was no less intense. “You thought I was just looking for a quick screw with someone on my team and you thought it was nice?”
“No,” she said in exasperation, “it was nice to imagine that someone like you might actually…” she trailed off, realising she was quickly crossing right over the line she had drawn in the sand right from the beginning.
“Darcy,” he started, but then the beginning of this whole conversation railroaded into her and she held up a hand to stop him.
“Wait…so, if I’m not just a target…what am I?”
The casual slope of his shoulders was starting to seep back and a slow smile was growing on his face. “The only target that’s mattered to me in a long time,” he said, without a hint of hesitation.
“Oh,” she said in a small voice, all of her interactions with him over the past few months rearranging themselves in her head, “so all those things you said to me…you were being honest?”
“Don’t know any other way to be,” he said. He was standing awfully close now.
“Oh,” she could hear how breathless she sounded, but couldn’t stop herself. He was close enough that the clean laundry smell of his t-shirt was clear in her nose. She wondered if he could hear how her heartbeat was skittering around.
“Was it nice,” he asked in a low voice that was running straight through her like a knife, “to imagine someone like me. Or was it nice to imagine me.”
“Wait,” she said, “wait. This is…I mean, the team,” she struggled to find all the reasons she knew this wasn’t a good idea, but it was hard when his blue eyes were bright and focused on her, when she couldn’t help but thinking about the way his scruffy facial hair would feel against her skin, how it made him so much more human than he looked with a clean jaw and a cowl.
“Clint and Natasha are breaking up every other week,” he said dismissively, “we’re professionals, we can handle it.”
“What if we…” she tried again.
“What if we don’t,” he answered, just the slightest pull to his voice that was the thing she didn’t know she’d been looking for, that hint of vulnerability that told her for all of his bravado, he really did want her in a way that made him scared.
And that was good, because she was fucking terrified and she didn’t want to be in this alone.
“It was nice,” she said, a smile creeping across her lips, “to imagine you.”
He blew out a short breath like a long pent up release and swiftly bent his head to close the distance between them and kiss her, one of his big hands threading through her hair the other falling almost tentatively on her hip.
She would admit to herself that she had imagined this. She had imagined this a lot. But she had never imagined it like this. She understood, at least academically, that Steve Rogers and Captain America were not really the same person. But she had spent a fair amount of time around the both of them these last few months, so she thought she could be forgiven for imagining that he would kiss the way he led the team, direct and forceful, goal oriented and focused.
This was Steve Rogers though, and she thought somewhat absently that maybe she hadn’t actually gotten to know Steve Rogers very well at all. He kissed like an exploration, taking his time, his lips wandering against hers, moving softly as if he wanted to try every variation of this first kiss, almost polite with gently parted lips, before he went forward.
Darcy was less patient.
Once her brain had sufficiently caught up with what was actually happening, she surged forward into him, one hand locking around his waist, the other scrambling for purchase against his impossibly tall shoulder, pulling herself onto her toes as she pushed insistently past his gentle lips, challenging him tofight back, to move forward, to show her what had kept him right here for so many months.
And then there was nothing tentative about him anymore. His pace was still lazy as he pressed his tongue into her mouth, but his hand gripped low on her hip, thumb rubbing deliberately at the line of her underwear under her dress, his other hand curling into her hair and tugging just enough so that her head tipped back and she settled to her feet, causing him to curl into her, his arm angling up her back supporting her weight easily as she leaned into it.
“Darcy,” he breathed against her skin as he broke away from her mouth, his teeth and tongue and lips sliding down her throat. “I need to stop.”
She gripped a hand into the waistband of his jeans, the angle he had her at was pressing her hips into his, making it very clear what the unspoken “or” was.
She stopped and thought for half a second, but she was getting very good at trusting her instincts. After all, that is what SHIELD had drilled into her. She half laughed aloud as the obvious drilling pun came to mind.
“What?” Steve asked, managing to sound mildly indignant but breathless as he bit lightly against her skin.
“I’ll tell you later,” she said with a grin, pulling his face up to look at him, “don’t stop.”
The wicked smile he gave in her answer was all Steve Rogers.
So was the hand that slipped under the edge of her skirt, rucking it up until his hand sat against her thigh as he backed her into the high counter behind her. “This okay?” he asked, looking at her carefully for a moment, “I mean, here?”
“Steve,” she said in exasperation, realising only after the fact that it was the first time she’d used his name, “this is not the time to start getting timid on me.”
She emphasised her point by placing her hand firmly against his ass and pulling him against her hips, pressing his erection into her thigh.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a choked voice and a cocky grin.
There was no way they were going to get out of this without anyone knowing, she thought as she felt his unshaven cheeks rubbing stubble burn into the delicate skin of her collarbone as he sucked marks into her neck. Of course, they would probably have to tell the team anyways before they went out into the field, so she couldn’t really bring herself to care. Not with the way his fingers were edging under the waistband on her panties, not the way his breathing grew harsh as she pulled against the back of his neck, as her other hand gripped his thigh and pulled it between hers.
Finally, when she couldn’t take the teasing anymore, she slipped her hand between them and pressed Steve’s under her panties to where she wanted him most.
“Christ,” he swore sharply as he fingers dipped between her wet folds. “Jesus Christ, Darcy.” He rested his head against her shoulder as he slowly explored the new territory. When his fingers brushed against her clit, her hips canted against his hand so hard she nearly lost her seat.
“Steve,” she breathed, one hand tucked under the waistband of his pants, one in his hair, “we can do slow later.”
He looked up at her with sharp anticipation, “yeah?” he asked, and she wasn’t sure if he was asking about the now of the later, but the answer was the same either way.
“Yeah,” she said, reaching to unbutton his jeans. His eyes closed and his head tipped back as she worked her hand under the waistband of his briefs to cup his hard length. It wasn’t the best angle and she didn’t have a lot of room, but she managed to wrap her fingers around him and pumped slowly up and down once, twice, before he gripped her wrist in his hand and pressed her hard back against the counter.
“We can do slow later,” he echoed, one hand clutching up the curve of her waist to cup her breast, his thumb running over her nipple as the other hand tugged at her panties until she lifted her hips and let him pull them off.
He pulled her to the edge of the counter with one hand while he pulled a condom from his pocket with the other before shoving his jeans and briefs down his legs. She pondered the incongruity of Captain America carrying a condom with him, and also fucking her on a counter when they were both still fully clothed for a moment, but then she couldn’t ponder anything at all as he pressed into her.
She could barely hear his groan from the rushing in her head as all her focus plummeted south to where he was joined with her. It was better than it should be, for their first time. It should have been a bit awkward, misplaced limbs and learning. But his very first thrust as he captured her mouth and canted forward made her want to scream.
It was a little bit rough and a little bit desperate, gasping for air, fingers clutching aimlessly at clothes and hair and skin, mouths missing contact half as often as not. It felt like forever and only a moment before he reached between them, his fingers finding her clit as he lost his rhythm, whispering hot against her neck. “I’m gonna…oh, god. Darcy.”
He was bruising her hips with his hand, but she didn’t care as his last few erratic thrusts and his fingers against her threw her headfirst over the edge and she cried out and fluttered round him, her arm knocking over a stack of paper as he groaned and fell heavy against her chest, her propped up elbows supporting both their weight on shaky muscles.
There was a long moment where the paper settled to the floor with a rustle and the only other noise was their harsh breathing as they settled back to earth.
“So,” he said after a moment, pressing his hand against the counter and pulling her upright with his arm behind her back and a little groan as he slipped out of her, “celebratory drink?”
“Yeah,” she said in a low and satisfied voice, “I’ll drink to that.”
He laughed as he took care of the condom and pulled up his jeans.
“What?” she asked, a bit indignantly as she picked up her panties.
“I told you you’d come around eventually.”