Chapter Text
SHIELD fell on a Wednesday.
Darcy Lewis had the terrible luck of being in the SHIELD building in New York when the agency, the world's bulwark against chaos, succumbed to the rot from within and crumbled down around them all.
Though, really, the timing of her small arms recertification couldn't have been better; she and Clint were in the range, near the armory, when the building went into lockdown and everything else went to hell.
When the alarms sounded, and a strange static hiss burst through the PA system, Darcy pulled her ear protectors off and cocked her head, confused at the sudden chaos. Turning to look at Clint, hoping for some explanation, she was shocked into a thick, dumbfounded haze -- more shocked than when a space tornado hit the ground in front of her SUV, or when alien elves tried to shoot her face off, or even the day her dad decided he was a superhero -- when Clint, without hesitation, pulled his side arm and aimed it at her.
She never even thought to bring up her own weapon, the cold surprise of the barrel of his gun overwhelmed her brain and she froze. Blinking stupidly, all she had time for was to wonder if this was Loki again, and then he fired.
The bang of the gun and the sharp clatter of the spent casing were dim, distant echoes through the numbness of her bewilderment.
A heavy weight hit her back, slamming her into the platform of the firing station, knocking the breath from her lungs. The weight continued to fall, hitting the back of her knees, and she would have tumbled over entirely if Clint hadn't caught her roughly by the collar and yanked her backwards towards him.
Once clear of whatever had caught on her feet, and after she'd taken a brief second to steady herself, she realized she'd been hit by the dead weight of the range master, a bloody hole through his throat and a pistol in his slack fingers.
"What--?" Darcy shook her head and tried to get the last three seconds to make some sort of sense.
"Puke later," Clint commanded roughly.
"You shot him."
"He was going to shoot you."
Darcy stared back down at the body. He must have been right behind her to have fallen against her like that, which meant Clint shot him right over her shoulder. She'd never even felt the other man approach. The pistol in his hand was a story all its own.
"I don't understand," she said, feeling both stupefied and shaky. She knew that guy. His name was Carl, she'd trained with him, she'd known him for months.
"I don't either," Clint admitted. "Reload."
And though it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do, she stepped back over Carl's body to follow Clint's order. It took a few tries but she finally managed to get her trembling fingers to force new rounds into the pistol's magazine.
"Now what?" She asked Clint as she holstered her weapon.
Clint plucked the gun from Carl's limp grip and tucked it into the back of his pants. "We figure out--"
He was cut off by a message tone over the PA, and the static and signal cut out, replaced by a tense, breathless voice calling desperately, "Hydra infiltration. Scuttle systems. Evacuate. Repeat Hydra--" the voice broke off into burst of gunfire and a strangle scream.
It was so surreal Darcy almost laughed. Her very own "Imperial troops have entered the base" moment. But, it wasn't funny. There was a dead man at her feet and it sounded a lot like somebody else had died to get that warning out.
A new voice took over the PA, this one as cold as the other was desperate. "Our time is now. Hail Hydra."
"Shit," Clint spat viciously as he gave her a hard shove towards the armory.
"Hydra?" Darcy shook her head and stumbled forward. "I thought Steve stuck a fork in them seventy years ago."
"Obviously not. Hitting New York's ballsy, though. I bet we're not the only ones."
"Well, hell." Darcy collected herself and ran to the armory door, trying her code on the lock. When that didn't work, Clint shoved her aside and tried his own, but he didn't have any better luck.
"Have to blow it. I think I have a charge in my kit," he muttered, turning away.
"Of course you do." Darcy rolled her eyes and pulled a small leatherman from her pocket and started prying at the faceplate. "How about if we let the girl whose dad built the system give it a crack before we make a bigger noise and tell the uber-Nazis where we are?"
"Make it fast," Clint growled, stepping back over to her.
"Two seconds, and cripes, give me some space, dude," she murmured absently as she pulled wires and ignored sparks and tried to work around the lockdown. The red 'denied' turned to a blue 'accepted' and she let out a long breath.
"Me first," Clint told her. "Watch my back."
"Yeah," she agreed with a jerky nod, putting away her knife and pulling her pistol. Safety off, finger on the slide, muzzle down.
He paused before he shoved the door open. "Darcy, this is the real deal."
She swallowed heavily and cast a pointed look back at the body of the range master. "I've got it."
Clint followed her gaze and sighed. "Focus on your training."
"You know," she said, her tone deceptively light and conversational. "I was really just supposed to be a babysitter. I mean, Fury never said as much, but I'm not an idiot."
Clint cuffed her lightly on the arm. "Focus Lewis. On three. And don't shoot me in the back."
"Funny guy," she grumbled, trying to get as firm a grip on her pistol as her sweaty hands would allow.
Clint held up one finger, and she took a moment to steady herself. On the second finger he locked eyes with her and nodded. On three he shoved open the door and went in low. Darcy held a beat and began to follow him, only to be driven back by a burst of gunfire. Clint returned fire, three quick rounds, followed by three heavy thuds. She followed then, trying to stay low as he'd done, and as Natasha had trained her a thousand times.
Clint turned right, and she turned left. As she began her pivot, she saw a figure move. More instinct than thought, she fired. The hard jerk of the pistol and the thunder of the shot sent a surge of adrenaline and terror through her already overworked nervous system. The man fell with a scream, grabbing his leg, and Oh God, she'd just shot a guy.
Clint ghosted past her towards the fallen man, his pistol trained the whole way.
"You won't win," the man hissed through pain-clenched teeth. "Cut off one head, two--" Clint fired, and the man slumped backwards, silent.
"I shot a guy," Darcy said, feeling weird and distant from her own body.
"Yeah, and you hit him," Clint said as he moved back towards her. "I say you pass your recertification."
"What if he'd been a good guy? I mean, I just--"
Clint grabbed her shoulders and gave her a little shake so she'd look up at him. "He was moving to fire. I saw it, and so did you even if you don't realize it yet. Your instincts were good."
"Right."
"Keep it together, Lewis."
Licking her lips she managed a half nod. "Holding."
"Good," he said, squeezing her shoulders, trying to be comforting. "I need you; we can't trust anybody else."
"How the hell did this happen?" She asked, rubbing a hand across her forehead.
"Guess Cap missed a few," Clint suggested darkly. "Grab a vest and as many mags as you can comfortably carry. We're going to have to fight our way out."
Darcy closed her eyes and cast a heartfelt plea to the universe, "Ten years of Call of Duty, don't fail me now."
Clint barked a laugh and glanced over at her as he pulled a bow from the rack. "I feel like, as your SO, I should warn you this is real life and not a game, but I've seen you play. You're terrifying. So, hey, go with that."
Darcy forced a thin little laugh of her own as she pulled on the body armor and tried to adjust the straps. The vests really weren't made for girls with girls, but she did the best she could and made a mental note to ask her dad to do something about the design. "I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn Tony taught me to fight dirty."
"Well, this will be as dirty as it gets, Darce. Don't make me tell Stark something happened to you." Clint gave his own vest a tug and looked hers over before nodding.
"Do my best," she promised, feeling queasy.
"Can you get into the main systems from here? See if you can find anything out?" Clint jerked his head towards the computer desk at the armorer's station.
"Yeah, yeah, I can do that."
Relieved to have something to do that didn't involve shooting people or dying, she scrambled over to the work station and started prying her way into SHIELD's systems. Unfortunately, she didn't get far before she hit a wall. The weirdest computer wall she'd ever hit.
"How long do we have?" She called out to Clint who was busy sticking weapons in every pocket and holster he had and then adding a few more up his sleeves and down his boots.
"Not long," he called back. "They'd have wanted to secure the armory asap; assume they realize they've lost their team here."
Biting her lip, Darcy tried harder to get around the wall, but the strange digital fuzz, and that was the best way she could describe it, was surrounding everything. "There's some sort of interference," she told Clint.
"Can you get through it?"
"Uh, maybe? I don't know. But definitely not in the time that we have." She shoved up from the chair, giving the computer a dark glower. She hated admitting defeat, especially to something technical. It was ... it was anathema to her blood and her bones and her DNA.
Clint frowned down at the computer with her. "Tell me you ignored orders for the five hundredth time and you've got your phone."
"Oh!" The crazy madness of the last few ... minutes? Had it only been minutes? Anyway, she was blaming the crazy madness for the reason she'd forgotten her phone. Pulling it from her pocket, she growled when she failed to get a signal. "They're jamming." She swiped up for a keypad and started tapping desperately.
She nearly dropped the phone when a floor shaking explosion rattled them both. Clint caught her elbow and started her back towards the door to the range. "No time."
She let him pull her along, but kept her focus fixed on the phone. "Just a second."
"We don't have a second," Clint snarled over his shoulder, tense and fierce.
"Got it," she crowed and brought the phone up to her ear.
"Talk and run."
Jogging after him, pistol in one hand, phone in the other, she quietly begged her father to pick up the phone.
"Stark."
"Dad! Listen--"
"Are you running?"
"Hydra's infiltrated SHIELD." And because, when said out loud, that sounded so completely ridiculous, she hurried to add, "No joke. Clint and I are trying to get out, but ..."
"On my way," Tony replied, and she could hear him moving, hear Jarvis in the background.
"'Kay." She hesitated a moment; she should hang up, let him go, but ... "Dad, I love you."
"I love you, too, kid. Five minutes."
Darcy dropped her phone back into her pocket and swallowed back a rising, burning swell of nausea. "Iron Man incoming. ETA, five minutes," she reported to Clint.
"Good." They skidded to a halt beside the door to the corridor beyond.
"And all those lectures about cell phones not being allowed. Ha!" She forced a smile up at him, trying for smug, but probably just looking like she was going to hurl.
Clint huffed a laugh. "I want it noted I've never lectured you about it."
"That's true," she agreed. "Neither has Natasha."
"No. Never give up an advantage." He snorted bitterly. "People say we're too paranoid. Yeah? Shit like this happens."
"Oh, consider this object lesson well and truly learned," Darcy assured him seriously.
Clint tested the draw on his bow and pulled out an arrow, nocking it. Once he was satisfied with his weapon he turned to Darcy. "You learned the layout like I told you to, right?"
Darcy nodded. "Yeah."
"Stay low and close to the walls," he directed. "If we get separated, do what you have to do to get the hell out. Don't go looking for me."
She nodded again and shifted her weight, shakiness overtaking her again. "Yeah."
"Darce," he prompted, a hard edge to his voice.
"Copy, Hawkeye."
He narrowed his eyes at her, trying to see if she was being a smartass or not. She wasn't. She was very deadly serious, because ... God. Hydra. This was unreal.
"Alright," he said at last. "Follow me tight."
And then they were out into the hall. Into the chaos. Into smoke and gunfire and screams.
While this was, indeed, nothing like a video game -- and Darcy was never stupid enough to think it might be, and the guys shooting at her were trying to actually kill her dead for real -- back when she'd actually had time to play, she'd been a fairly badass gamer, and it was with some surprise that she realized some of those instincts were kicking in. Instincts bolstered, of course, by more than a year of training with Clint and Natasha, but, still, she knew how to seek cover, knew how to keep the threat in front of her, knew how to see the field in a way that she didn't think came entirely from Natasha's frankly bizarre version of Hogan's Alley.
It felt like it took an hour to work their way down the hallway, but, Darcy discovered that when people were shooting at you, everything sped up and slowed down, and time warped and twisted far beyond her mind's ability to keep hold of. In reality it probably only took them a couple of minutes.
Clint led her past the stairs, insisting they were a death trap, and he was planning to have them scale the elevator shaft. Because his was a world, and this was a day, where that was the safe option.
He tried to pry the doors open with the edge of his bow while Darcy watched behind them. When his bow slipped and his knuckles rapped loudly on the door, he swore viciously and started attacking the door in ernest.
"Wait," Darcy called. In the few non-warped seconds she'd had to think and breathe, she ran the building's plans through her mind, searching desperately through her memory for alternate routes and fall-back positions. During a quick, and probably scatter-shot, mental tour of each floor, she found exactly what she was looking for. And grimaced at herself -- when she'd seen the plans the first time, she'd laughed at what she'd assumed was over-the-top Cold War paranoia.
"We don't have time," Clint grunted.
"No, no," she backed up to him and grabbed his arm. "I have an idea."
Tugging him after her, she ran to the stairwell, ignoring his grumble of protest. There was another explosion, and a great cloud of smoke and shouts of 'Hail Hydra' rolled towards them.
Clint laughed, a strangely grim, yet gleeful sound. "Well, at least they're not shy about letting us know who they are."
Darcy ignored him and stuck her head through the door to the stairwell only enough to determine the floor was clear, and then she darted through and down the stairs.
"Down is not out," Clint said, his boots clattering heavily behind her.
"Down is out. I hope. Trust me."
"I'm following you, aren't I?"
"I guess so."
She led him down two floors, and went for the door when he stopped her. "Where are we going?"
"My grandfather built this building--"
He squinted at her and asked skeptically, "And you inherited magical building whisperer powers?"
Darcy scowled at him. "No. But, when you told me to learn the layout, Jarvis had the original building plans. I learned them, too. There's another way out."
Clint nodded. "Okay, which way?"
Darcy closed her eyes, thinking through the blueprints again. "Right and then second left."
"You're sure?"
"Well, I mean, the building's been remodeled in the last fifty years, but, hey, fingers crossed."
Clint accepted that easily enough and eased towards the door. "Me first," he said again. Meeting no resistance in the hallway, he called back to her, "Come on."
They were in the fourth sub-level, which actually made it six floors below the lobby. The floor was mostly records -- paper records -- and some storage and a block of temporary bunks Darcy didn't think had seen much use in the last decade. Hopefully it was low on Hydra's priority list.
They ran silently through empty corridors. Anybody unfortunate enough to be posted down here had probably already evacuated or moved up to take on the fight on the upper floors.
The hallway Darcy remembered from the plans was a long, empty corridor, broken only by one door. Dashing over to the door, she didn't even bother trying her code and skipped right to prying off the security panel, working to override.
"You're disturbingly good at that," Clint observed, voice mild. "I don't think I taught you that. Natasha?"
Darcy laughed as they darted into the dark room, lit only by the thin glow of the emergency lights on the fringes of the space. "No, my dad, actually. He doesn't trust SHIELD and when I joined up, he made sure I could override ... well, everything."
"Should have known. Okay, where next?"
Darcy waved a hand at the vast, gloomy room. "Far wall. About halfway, I think."
Clint nodded and jogged off into what was probably better called a warehouse than something as simple and confining as a room. A vast, black space that seemed to swallow any sound of their passage, its thick air, heavy with the wet musty dust of old paper and tang of rotting equipment stacked on row after row and aisle after aisle of metal shelves and filing cabinets. This was clearly where secrets went to die.
Once at the back wall, they jogged down along the length, lined by rows of heavy metal cabinets. Making it to what Clint determined was the halfway point, he stopped and looked at her. "Now what?"
"Give me a second," Darcy told him breathlessly.
"You keep saying that," he grumbled, tapping the tip of his bow impatiently on the floor.
"And I keep winning at life. Shut up, Barton." She pressed a hand to her temple and tried to call the blueprints to mind one last time. After her second, she opened her eyes and pointed to her right. "Okay, you start here, and go that way, and I'll take the other side. We're looking for a door. It'll be hidden in some way, but I don't know exactly how. I'm hoping we can find a seam or something else that screams 'door!'."
"A hidden door. Of course," Clint snorted, but slipped his bow across his body and stepped up to the first set of cabinets, trying to pull them back enough to look behind.
"It's a super secret government facility built during the cold war. Are you really surprised?" Darcy asked, starting on her own cabinet.
"Where does the door go?"
"Tunnel to another tunnel to a subway tunnel," Darcy told him, hissing a little when her thumb caught in a drawer of the cabinet she was trying to look behind. Well, at least SHIELD insisted she be up to date with her tetanus boosters.
"I will raise a glass to Howard's paranoia when we get out of here," Clint promised solemnly.
"I will raise all the glasses," Darcy agreed.
They worked in silence for a few minutes after that. A few minutes where Darcy felt her own desperation grow with the eye-strain of looking for who-only-knew-what in the half light.
"Here," Clint called softly.
Letting out a long, relieved breath, she ran over to him and helped shift a cabinet back and out of the way. The door was about half-sized, a metal plate painted to look like electrical access. They spent another minute or so prying it open, and its hinges, unused for half a century, shrieked in protest. Once open, they both rocked back on their heels, slapped away by a wall of cold, wet air rank with mildew and stagnation.
Clint took a penlight from his vest and stuck it in his teeth, then stuck his head through the black opening. When he sat back, he smiled at her and pulled the light from his mouth. "I'm putting a gold star in your file for your above and beyond thoroughness at following orders."
"Go me," she said with an absent shrug. Today didn't really feel like a day where she cared over much about her file. Not even enough to appreciate his attempt at humor.
He laughed anyway. "I'll go first. If it hasn't been used in fifty years, it might be dicey."
"This is me not stopping you." When he didn't move right away she frowned at him. "What?"
"Stark's going to be tearing the place apart looking for you," he said, giving her a considering look.
"Well, that'll keep Hydra busy," she said, biting into some savage satisfaction at that thought. "And, if we can't get the building back, knowing how much he loves him some property damage, he'll go a long way towards making this place unusable for them."
"True."
But Clint continued to hesitate and she sighed. "I'll call him when we hit the subway, if I can get a signal."
"Is Banner in town? Wasn't he coming in today?"
"Hey, double the fun for Hydra."
He grunted his agreement and stuck the light back in his teeth and finally started his crawl into the tunnel. There wasn't enough room to stand, but they could walk along in a low crouch.
"Are you feeling left out?" Darcy asked.
"What?" Clint mumbled around the flashlight.
"I mean, two of the Avengers are up there, probably right now, and you're stuck in a muddy tunnel leading me out."
"I think you're the one who pointed the way," Clint told her, words slurring.
"You know what I mean."
"Priorities," he said easily and finally took the light out of his mouth. "You first, then I'll come back and catch up with Stark and Banner."
"Okay."
"I think there'll be enough for me when I get back," he snorted.
She didn't want to ask the question, her own brain had started to paint a horrible picture already, but she had to. "How bad do you think this really is?"
"Bad."
"Thanks for the insight," she said, voice tight.
"I've known Carl for six years, Darce," Clint told her quietly. "He turned on us without a second thought. Every single one of those people shooting at us was a SHIELD agent. Hydra didn't invade, they've been here for ... fuck, who knows how long."
"Long game," she said quietly.
"Yeah. This is very bad. We need to get out and regroup with the, you know, four people we trust completely."
"How do we know though?" She asked just a touch desperately, feeling overwhelmed by events she didn't even have a real sense of yet. "If they've been here all along. If --"
"Well," he said cutting her off. "It's a safe bet you're not Hydra."
She nodded and played along with him. "And you didn't try to sell me to them, so ..."
"That's one each. If Natasha's dirty ... Jesus, I can't even imagine." Maybe it was just Darcy's own fear and panic, but she thought his voice shook. "I should just stand there and let her shoot me if I've been played this long."
She didn't really have anything to say to that. She'd never managed to get a solid grasp on their relationship. Partners was probably the best term, the only one that could hope to encompass the complexity of their ... whatever.
"Fury for sure," she said quickly but felt a burst of doubt. "Right?"
"Yeah. Do you think they'd have waited this long if he was in charge of Hydra? Fuck, do you think they'd be this blatant if he was?" Clint laughed, rusty in the stifling dank. "Hill, too. She's Fury's through and through."
"Okay. And Steve."
"So, I was off -- we've got five whole people," he snorted, sounding too amused when facing that reality.
"How can we possibly lose?" Darcy said with a thin laugh.
"Nat and Cap are in DC. So is Fury. Hydra probably hit that hard," Clint mused.
"God," Darcy breathed out and bit her lip. "I feel like ..." she trailed off.
"What?"
"We just went to war, didn't we?"
"Yes," Clint confirmed bluntly.
"I'm getting a very apocalypse vibe," Darcy muttered. The New York base was falling on top of them. She didn't know what was happening in DC or anywhere else; it colored every one of her thoughts with a strange feeling of both chaos and blindness. Things spinning out of control. And if Hydra really did hit DC, too, then ... then was there anywhere safe? Anywhere they could regroup?
They reached the second tunnel, larger than the first, and when they stood, Clint caught her arm.
"If Hydra takes control, the world is fucked," he said. "But there were agents fighting back. We're not alone. And we can't walk away."
"I didn't say I was going to," she ground out, raising her chin stubbornly. She could be freaked out, okay? She could be freaked out and still not back down.
"I know," Clint said firmly. "I just also know this is big. This is bigger than anything I've ever seen."
"You're super comforting, Barton," she snorted.
"Cowboy up, Lewis," he told her with a crooked grin.
"Hey, I've got a family legacy of kicking these assholes in the teeth to live up to." With a sigh she leaned back against the dirt-caked wall. "When Coulson recruited me, he told me he needed me to save the world. I just didn't think he meant, you know, literally."
Clint dropped back to lean next to her. "Would you have said no if you did?"
"I told him no like a hundred times."
"But you signed on anyway."
Darcy choked on a tired laugh. "Turns out I like you jokers, and he knew it."
"Phil was always good at knowing what buttons to push," he muttered, and eased himself off the wall, starting the long walk down the tunnel again.
Darcy pursed her lips and followed after him. He didn't like talking about Coulson. He blamed himself too much for the other agent's death. And it was all tied in to the mental scars he still bore from Loki's control. Still, maybe it was time. It was the end of the world. Sort of.
She made a silent apology to Phil, and then tossed him a silent curse, because, seriously, what had taken him so long? Then she spoke up and broke her own personal rule about secrets that weren't hers and the telling of them.
"There's a sixth person we can trust."
"Stark, Banner, and Thor. I make eight," Clint said, not looking back at her.
"So pedantic. But, I meant at SHIELD."
"There's nobody else I trust this much," he assured her shortly.
"Phil."
"Darcy," he sighed.
"He's still alive."
He stopped in front of her, his entire body going rigid. "Are you speaking metaphorically? Like, he's with us in spirit?"
"No. Like he's with us in the flesh. Well, not right here right now, obviously. But, he's got a team out there ... somewhere. Or he did. God, did Hydra hit them, too?" Swallowing heavily she shuddered at the thought. Chaos and blindness. The fog of war; she finally, really understood what that meant.
Clint turned abruptly and took a step towards her, crowding her against the wall. "Explain. Explain how you knew this and never told me."
Her back scraped against the rough concrete and she was faced with a furious sniper and that was almost more terrifying than when Hydra was shooting at her. "He ... God, it wasn't my secret to tell. He wanted to tell you himself, I don't know why he's waited so long."
"And you decided to wait until now to pop off?"
He was scaring her, but she was no shrinking violet and found her temper flaring to match his own. "Well, seeing as I had a whole hand left over after the 'who's not a scumbag' headcount, I thought, yeah, now was the time to consider everybody we could trust."
"How do you know he's alive? Explain this to me," he demanded again.
"He broke into my apartment one night. Like, a couple months before that whole thing with the Mandarin. That's when I finally said yes to SHIELD."
"And?"
"And what? He came back when the house blew up and my dad was presumed dead. And ..." she stopped and sighed, if he wasn't pissed now, he was about to go ballistic. "I've met his team. After London, Fury sent me to do a systems check on their plane. And, well, he calls every now and then. Though, I haven't heard from him in a couple months."
Clint's teeth were clenched tightly enough she could swear she heard the grinding. The muscles in his jaw were bunched and jumping, and his breathing was harsh in the narrow space.
"Who else knows?" He forced the words through barely restrained anger.
"Fury, obviously. Hill, too, I think. She gave me the 'shut up and don't say anything' look when I handed her my paperwork." She bit her lip and looked away from him down into the inky blackness of the tunnel beyond, wondering if she should tell him the last name on her list.
"And?"
"Nobody else, as far as I know," she lied and hated it. "I mean, I'm sure some other people at SHIELD know, and his team, but--"
"You're lying. Who else, Darcy?"
What would this do to the team? They were all big boys, they could deal with their own issues, but did they have time for that? God, this was all so, so bad.
"Now is not the time," she said at last.
"Now is exactly the time," Clint exclaimed, exasperated. "Jesus, Darcy, how many fucking secrets do you have?"
"You know what? Screw you," she spat at him, furious, because, hello to the damned hypocrisy. "How many do you have?"
"I know things that are classified," he said with a humorless, gritty laugh. "But, you keep secrets like it's a God damned Olympic sport."
"Oh, sure, yeah, this is totally a good time for me," she shot back. "Watching you beat yourself up about Phil's death and not being able to say a thing? Super awesome."
"So why didn't you?" He pressed.
"Because he asked me not to," she shouted, her temper breaking fully through at last. "He kept my secret. He never even told Fury. How could I do anything less than the same for him? How could I let him down?" Her voice broke and she took a deep, shuddering breath.
"I'm sorry, but damn it, Clint, I would keep your secrets, too, and, yeah, I'd hate the lies, but I wouldn't regret it, because it's a trust," she punctuated the last three words with hard slaps to his chest. "And I know what trust means. Do you know how many people know who my dad is? Spoiler alert: not many. But you do. Take it to the tabloids, pal. You'd make a mint, retire in style. Go ahead, I won't stop you."
Clint took a step back as her temper spilled over. "I wouldn't do that," he said, sounding suddenly subdued, but then his face hardened again, all sharp lines and deep shadows in the feeble light. "Wait a second, how did this become about me?"
Darcy clapped a hand on her mouth and then waved both arms at him. "How are you this frustrating?" She exclaimed. "I get that this sucks for you, and I can't actually imagine how much. I'm sorry I hurt you, but I can promise you I'd never keep a secret that was actually, you know, dangerous or whatever, to you or anybody else."
"It's not like I'd ever know, though, would I?" His voice was snide, his body so rigid her own bones ached to look at him. "So tell me, how do I trust you?"
Darcy closed her eyes and set her jaw. "Do you trust Phil?"
"I used to."
"Oh my God," she hissed. "Get over the butthurt."
He let out a sound, a strangled snarl of anger and hurt and God only knew what else, and stepped back to her, crowding her once more. "Who else knows?"
Putting her hands on his chest, she gave him a good hard shove. "Back off, Barton."
"Tell me."
"Do you really want to know? Because I don't think you do. I think you want somebody else to be mad at. Just stick with being pissed at me."
"I want to know who's been lying to my face."
"I am not a liar," she snarled back.
"You lied about this."
"Holy ..." she nearly choked on the frustration and the extreme madness of this whole argument. "I'm just trying to keep a bad situation from getting worse."
He fell silent for a moment, the sudden quiet making her ears ring, before finally he laughed, thin and bitter. "You sound like Fury. Lock every damned thing down, only you get to decide who knows what."
Darcy could not have been more surprised if he'd slapped her. She might have actually preferred that. "That's not true," she told him weakly.
He'd stepped away from her again, pacing up and down the tunnel, just a couple of steps at a time, but his body language was several levels beyond agitated. "I'd wondered why Fury was down with you being our liaison. A green rookie? Really? I figured it was mostly a sop to Stark -- keep him happy, keep an eye on you."
Her head was still spinning from Clint's accusation. Her dad hated the games Fury played -- the half-truths, the carefully managed intel that never told a tenth of the story, the endless hidden agendas. God, she didn't do that, did she?
"But, I think I see now," Clint continued. "You're too good at keeping secrets. Fury's using you to keep us in line, isn't he? And God knows we wouldn't suspect it for a second. Hey, you're the rook, Stark's kid, the smartass, the mouthy, flighty co-ed who pals around with an astrophysicist. We'd all think we had you figured. Sure, why not train the kid? Made sense to me. Natasha'd already started giving you self-defense lessons, so I'd teach you to shoot. Steve was teaching you strategy, because you're always so damned curious, aren't you?"
"Clint--" The words died in her throat when he turned his hard gaze back on her.
"We trained our own watcher," he said with a growl. "The whole time you've been Fury's little ace-in-the-hole with the Avengers, somebody he knows can lock everything down, break the truth into tiny pieces -- for our own good, of course. And we'd trust everything you told us." He stared hard at her, and his lips turned up into something almost cruel. "Here's the question, Darce -- Do you even know you're Fury's right hand?"
Darcy pulled off her glasses and pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes. It took several deep breaths before she felt pulled together enough to answer.
"Listen to yourself, Clint. Holy shit, listen to yourself. Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD, and suddenly Fury and I are the bad guys? Because Phil asked me to keep his secret?" Laughing a little hysterically, she scrubbed her hands over her face.
"This is surreal," she said, feeling more bewildered than she could successfully cope with. "This is so freaking surreal. When I was a kid, my grandpa Jim gave me a Captain America book -- and this was before I knew Howard was my grandfather -- and my brother and I used to fight Hydra in our backyard. They were history, they were cartoon villains, but, oh my God, Clint, they tried to kill me today. And I shot a guy," she shouted, waving a hand helplessly in the air, before dragging it through her messy hair.
"I shot a guy," she repeated after a deep breath, "and there is a building above us that's falling down right now. SHIELD is under attack and suddenly I'm Fury Jr. I can't take this. Holy mother of God, I can't deal with this."
Shoving her glasses back on, she stalked away from him, making her way carefully down the pitch black tunnel. Clint had the only light and he wasn't moving, but she was damned if she was going to stand there and take it while he decided she was the bad guy in this movie.
Irate and feeling adrift, it never occurred to her to pull out her phone to light the way. The second time she tripped over something, she let out a string of frustrated curses and kicked the wall with a sob she couldn't hold back however much she wanted to.
Clint's hand caught her elbow again and he steadied her, his light pushing back the gloom as he joined her. "Just ... please, Darcy. Who else? Natasha?"
"Steve," she said, weary of the whole thing. They could duke it out themselves. She was so done. "I told you how Phil came to see me after Tony went missing. Well, Steve came to check on me, too. If it makes you feel any better, Steve was royally pissed."
"Not really."
She shrugged. "Fine, but let this point sink in, if you can. We did it for Phil, because he asked. It's as simple as that. And now you know all my secrets."
"Right," he said flatly, sounding as though he wasn't buying that, but she found herself not really caring.
Giving him a dark side-eye, and with a heavy dose of sarcasm, she asked, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Can I stop you?" Clint snarked back.
"I know a lot of people, but how is it you're the only one that can send me from zen to full throttle -- as in, I am fully prepared to throttle you," she curled her hands and shook them in the air, a little like how she'd like to shake Clint, "in like three nanoseconds? Seriously? That's including my dad."
He snorted humorlessly. "Back at ya, Darce."
They walked in silence for a while longer before Clint spoke up again.
"I never saw you," he said simply, like it was an explanation for everything.
Still feeling bruised from his earlier accusation and their argument, she was maybe a little more aggressive than she meant to be when she demanded, "What's that mean?"
"It means, I watched you in New Mexico--"
"Stalked from the rooftops," she corrected automatically.
He ignored her. "-- and I never saw you. Even after Coulson waved me off, I couldn't put it together. It bugged me."
"Why would you have, though?" She asked with a frown, prickly defensiveness giving way to puzzlement.
"See? That's the thing," Clint exclaimed, waving a frustrated hand at her. "You say that like it's no big deal, that I didn't clock you as somebody Coulson and Fury would want to keep an eye on. You don't understand. I watch people, Darcy. I'm patient and I wait and I watch and I learn them and I never saw you."
Chewing on the inside of her cheek, Darcy took a few more steps before replying. "I don't know what to say to that. I mean, do you want me to apologize for not being whatever you thought I was? 'Cause I'm pretty sure Jane would agree with the flighty co-ed assessment. So, maybe you weren't as far off as you think."
That forced a quiet, if somewhat weak, chuckle from him.
Darcy sighed and pressed a hand to her forehead. "Maybe you saw plenty, but just didn't see it all together until we actually met. Or, hell, maybe there's not as much to see as you think there should be."
He didn't respond to that and they kept walking, finally making it to the large, rusty bulkhead door. After a couple more minutes they managed to pry that door open, too. It opened out into a concrete, newer looking, much shorter tunnel, properly lit by a wire-caged industrial light. From there it maybe thirty feet to another heavy door, and, if the plans were right, the subway tunnel. Next challenge, don't get smeared across the tracks by a train.
How long had they been down here, anyway? Iron Man and Hulk had probably already leveled the building. Poor Clint, he'd missed all the fun.
"Look, be as pissed at me as you want," Darcy said as they left the ancient cold war tunnel. "I get it. But, maybe we should deal with the fact that Hydra's back and the world's about to go to hell first? That's the only reason I didn't want to tell you about Steve. Now's just a crappy time for you two to get into a thing. Yes, we didn't tell you, but it was about making a promise to Phil, and not about wanting to screw you over."
"I'll table it for now," he said quietly.
She let out a relieved breath. "Thank you."
"Anything else you want to tell me that'll piss me off? Now that I'm agreeing to be peaceable about this for the moment."
"No, you've got the big ones. My dad's Tony, Phil's not dead, that's it." She paused and hummed under her breath. "Well, there is this one thing."
He let out a strangled moan. "Fuck, Darcy."
"No, it's not ..." she rushed to reassure him but stumbled to a stop, because, well, it was kind of something that would tick him off, but probably in more of a general way and less of a emotionally traumatizing way. "I mean, okay, here's the thing. I broke into your apartment last week. You were out of town. I was hiding from Jane."
"You couldn't hide somewhere else?" He asked, sounding more resigned than pissed. It wasn't her first uninvited visit to his place, after all. She'd felt bad about that at one point, but then, well ... he was out of town a lot, and sometimes a girl just needed to get the hell away.
"Well, Jarvis narcs me out at the tower, and you've got a really comfy couch and an awesome TV."
"You bought the TV."
"You didn't have one. And, technically, my dad's AmEx bought the TV."
Clint groaned and shook his head. "Hey, wait, you! You drank my last two beers. Damn it, I blamed Natasha for that."
She gave him a look that she hoped said, loudly, 'how are you that dumb'. "You know her feelings about beer, she'd never drink that."
He glowered at her and his lip curled up at one edge. "Well, you could have replaced it."
"I meant to. I totally did, I swear, but then my dad called and said he was bored and Bruce was still out of town, and that's a red alert situation. So, you know, sorry, I'll make it up to you."
"I'll hold you to that." They got the door to the subway opened and took stock of the new environment. "We're probably not far from the platform," Clint said.
"Is this an active tunnel?" Darcy honestly couldn't tell. It was as dark as anywhere else.
"I think so," he murmured. "There's a walkway on the other side. We'll make a run for it."
Darcy stared uneasily down into the black beneath their feet. "And hope the CHUDS don't get us."
"Jesus, Darcy," Clint laughed a little helplessly.
Once they safely made the maintenance walkway on the other side, they paused to listen for trains.
"Phil's really alive?" Clint asked suddenly.
"Yes."
"He's not like some weird robot or clone?"
"I don't think so," Darcy said, but she understood the disbelief. She'd gone through that list of 'what is this thing before me' when he'd returned from the dead and turned up in her apartment.
"He seems Phil-like to me," she continued after a moment of thought. "Of course, the two times I asked the Director about it, he threw me out of his office. Man, the second time, Fury called in security and had them escort me out of the building. That's when he banned me from the Triskelion. The frog-march of shame across the bridge was not awesome." She set her jaw, irritated at the memory. He could have just told her to get lost. That had worked the first time, after all. She supposed he just had to make the big, giant, jackass point. Message received, sir.
"So, now you know what that was all about," she continued bitterly. "Oh, I guess that was kind of a secret I had, but it was ancillary to another, so does it count as a whole separate one?"
Clint's lips were pressed together firmly and he shook his head. It took her a second to realize he wasn't mad, but was instead trying not to laugh. "I'm sorry I accused you of being Fury's right hand, when you are clearly his karma."
"I ... I can't tell if I should be insulted by that or not." She frowned at him and decided to let it go. For now. "Okay, so, anyway, we know Fury is totes hiding something, but Phil got all distant and sad puppy eyes when I tried to subtly bring it up with him, and I cannot take the puppy eyes. I just can't do it."
"I've noticed," he told her with an obnoxiously smug smirk.
"I know you have," she groused sourly. "You need to stop pulling that crap; I have to leave the room every time you do it."
"Your Achilles' heel," he shook his head, clearly continuing to be desperately disappointed by her life in general. "What will you do when a narco-terrorist tries that?"
Scrunching up her nose, she stared back at him, incredulously. She might be bad, but she wasn't that bad. Maybe. "Uh, remember he's a narco-terrorist, I hope."
"Uh-huh," he grunted, unconvinced but dropping the subject as they worked their way along the narrow, concrete walkway. There wasn't a lot of room if a train came by. Though, hopefully, MTA would have recognized the, you know, madness near this stop and diverted the trains.
"I'm still pissed," Clint said after a moment.
"Okay. I don't know what you want me to do," she told him honestly.
"Just ... I'm just letting you know."
Sighing, she nodded and accepted his totally understandable anger. A promise to Phil was the main reason she never told Clint, but knowing it would hurt him was solidly second on the list. "Yeah, alright."
When the light from the subway platform hit them, he gave her a long look and a fortifying thump on the shoulder. "Hydra first."
She nodded back and prepared herself. "Hydra first."