Chapter Text
Darcy stared at her monitor. Poked F3. Poked F11. Hit enter a few times, just in case. Then she pushed her keyboard out of the way, slowly lowered her forehead to her desk, and sighed, "Aw, computer, no."
"Agent Lewis, I would very much appreciate if it you'd stop adopting my husband's speech patterns. It's disconcerting."
"Sorry, Boss." Darcy waved a hand at the screen without lifting her head from the desk. "I thought IT unhacked the hack."
"Apparently they missed a bit."
Eyes narrowed, she twisted around and met Agent Phil Coulson's best bland expression. No one ever believed her when she mentioned his sense of humour. That he'd been replaced with an LMD after the whole Loki stabbity stabbity thing? Yes. That he'd been brought back from the dead by way of alien necromancy? Yes. But suggest he took every opportunity to indulge in inane wordplay and the SHIELD-wide reaction was disbelief. Impolite disbelief. "A bit?"
"Or a byte. Have you called it in?"
She turned to face the red symbol in the centre of her black screen and her lip curled. "It just happened."
From the other side of the bank of filing cabinets that separated Darcy's office from the fake cubicle farm, the voice of a junior agent – they were all junior agents in the fake cubicle farm – rose above the ambient noise. "Oh fuck you very much Hydra!"
"And apparently," she added, "it didn't just happen to me. IT is going to be swamped." The hack hadn't gotten deep enough to pull any information or do any actual damage. It was petty and annoying and probably the most successful action Hydra had taken against SHIELD in years. IT had chased it from computer to computer for about ten days before declaring it defeated.
Erroneously.
"Then you'd best not delay calling it in."
"Fuck you very much indeed, Hydra," she muttered reaching for the phone.
Usually, I'm calling from Agent Coulson's office were magic words that lit a fire under the most recalcitrant of the support staff. Once, literally. Clint swore it hadn't been him and Natasha had only smiled her knife-edge smile when asked. But this morning it seemed IT really was swamped and it was twenty-three minutes and forty-one seconds of actual paper filing before someone showed up. Darcy wasn't so much timing it as she was painfully aware of every excruciating moment as it passed.
"You can't hack paper, Agent Lewis," she muttered in her best Coulson imitation as she slid copies of form A77 – colloquially known What real estate did they destroy this time? – into coloured coded folders. "No, but you can burn it, compost it, spill coffee on it..."
"Hey! IT looking for Agent Coulson's office. How lost am I?"
Darcy turned to see a young woman, her age or maybe a bit younger, standing by her desk, a messenger bag slung over one shoulder. She had brown hair and eyes and was, like most of the SHIELD agents Darcy had met, ridiculously attractive. Anyone with eyes had to have noticed that every smart and/or deadly person SHIELD acquired had a level of hot that should've gotten them their own television show, their looks ranging from geek cute to dangerous smolder. She had to admit that the later was remarkably effective – she'd spontaneously told Nastasha her high school locker combination while Earth's Mightiest Heroes watched The Breakfast Club during team movie night.
Steve was the Jock and Tony was the Brain and Bruce was the Basketcase and Clint was the Criminal and they'd unanimously agreed that Thor was the Princess. Thor had borrowed a lipstick, tucked it between flexed pecs, and smeared it all over his beard. Darcy may or may not have taught Steve how to roll a spliff... depending on who was asking.
"Hello? You okay?"
Darcy jerked, blinked, and turned her attention back to the here and now. "Sorry. Just reflecting on how weird my life has gotten."
The young woman rolled her eyes. "Yeah, tell me about it. So, Agent Coulson's office?'
"You're there. Here. It's here." Darcy frowned. "You're both here actually. You and Agent Coulson's office."
"Really?" She looked around at the desk and the chair and the bank of double width, five foot high filing cabinets that separated things from the cubicle farm. "Not how I imagined it."
"No lasers and a lack of scorch marks on the floor?"
"No walls."
"Ah. Well, technically, Agent Coulson's office is back there." Darcy turned just far enough to wave at the plain wooden door. "He has walls. And a window. I'm the guardian at the gate."
"You know that was a giant, evil squid, right?"
"Interestingly enough, that's why I called you." She nodded at her monitor.
"Technically, that's an octopus. Except for the whole skull thing. It's definitely not a hydra through. I mean, how seriously can you take an evil organization intent on world domination when they can't even get their totem animal right." She slid into Darcy's chair and pulled a laptop out of her bag. "I'm Skye, by the way."
"Skye No-Last-Name? The Rising Tide hacker the boss brought in? The one who spread the details of Senator Reiter's trip to Latveria all over the internet? The one who cracked the com system and added in bed to the end of every inter office communication?"
Skye shrugged. "Works for fortune cookies."
"While I can honestly say, you're one of my heroes, are you allowed to wander around unsupervised?" Peering over Skye's shoulder, Darcy tried and failed to find a pattern in her keystrokes. "Given that you're responsible for Director Fury telling Agent Sitwell he wanted the new trainees to be a little more flexible in bed, I figured you'd be stuck with a babysitter for a while. Like, maybe years. Decades. The rest of your natural life."
"Technically, I am. I even get walked out of the building at the end of the day, but IT emptied out this morning and I assumed the open work order without delay; trust me, you don't want to go to MacReady flag that popped up with your message, complete with a classic Duke Nukem shooting himself in the head, trumped orders given by a dude in a short-sleeve, checked shirt clearly attempting to tick every box on last millennium's IT stereotype list."
Darcy considered that for a moment. "You're probably not wrong. I'm Darcy, by the way."
Hands frozen over the keyboard, Skye turned enough to look Darcy in the eye. "The Darcy who let the aliens go?"
As an identifier it was better than the Darcy who's banging Captain America. While she certainly wasn't embarrassed by her sex life – duh, not only Captain remarkably-short-recovery-time America but Steve ladies-first-every-time Rogers – she preferred not to be defined by the visitors to her vagina.
Except...
"No one knows about the aliens." She frowned. "Wait, you hacked the com feed?"
"Please, the security on the earbud's carrier wave sucks. I couldn't get the part that went through Iron Man's armor but any halfway decent hacker could grab the rest of it with a few tweaks to a crystal radio set."
"I don't know what that is. Not important," she added when it looked like Skye was about to explain. "Can I assume you've fixed that little flaw now you're on the side of the angels?"
Skye's brows rose. "Angels?"
"Spend all day praising God, with one wingtip dipped in blood. It's from a movie called The Prophecy but it's a pretty accurate definition of our happy little family." She frowned. Considered the amount of praising going on, and added, "Well, the wingtip in blood part anyway."
"Lovely." Skye hit return. The Hydra symbol disappeared and the screen filled with a rapidly scrolling pattern of ones and...
"Are those wingdings?"
"Don't worry. It's a placeholder while the scrubbing finishes. People get freaky if they can't see something happening." She sighed and slumped lower in Darcy's chair. "And I haven't fixed the com system yet because Agent Winters doesn't trust me with that kind of access."
Agent Winters was the head of IT. He'd shown up personally to straighten out the problem with Agent Coulson's system caused by an EMP going off in the labs. It had, in fact, caused a problem with everyone's system and, weirdly, shut down the espresso machine in a coffee shop around the corner from SHIELD's New York offices, but as neither everyone nor, apparently, the coffee shop could write transfers to Antarctica, Agent Winters hadn't bothered to grace them with his presence. He'd blamed Darcy for not shutting her terminal down quickly enough, and then schooled her on the amount of mallware that could ride in on cat videos. Darcy'd schooled him in turn on the dangers of My Little Pony porn and they parted on terms of mutual dislike. "Did he miss the part where you already have access?"
"He thinks I should be in prison."
"Please, has he met our field agents? And half the Avengers? Get my computer cleaned up and I'll deal with it."
Skye spun the chair around and peered up at her. "How?"
"The words calling from Agent Coulson's office give me a terrifying amount of power. I think it's a test, to see if I'll abuse it."
"Do you?"
Darcy shrugged. "Define abuse."
After a long moment, Skye laughed. "You're a dangerous woman. I like that."
"Ditto." Darcy grinned. "On both counts."
The computer made a sound like a cat hacking up a hairball and Skye turned to check the monitor, now showing Darcy's creamy gold desktop. "Is that..." Eyes narrowed, Skye leaned forward. "...an extreme closeup of someone's six pack?"
"Good eyes. You're only the second person who's picked up on that."
"Is this...?"
"Yes, it is."
"You're objectifying Captain America." Skye shut down her laptop and slid it into her messenger bag as she stood. "I can't decide if I'm impressed or appalled. Doesn't it bother him?"
"One..." Darcy dropped into her chair. "...he's not the second person. Two, if you don't spill, everyone else will continue thinking it's abstract art. And three, have you seen his uniform? Leaves nearly nothing to the imagination. Ass." She cupped one hand. "Kevlar infused lycra." She cupped the other. "I keep wondering if that was the part the boss designed."
Skye glanced toward the office door. "Agent..."
"Shhh. If you say his name, he appears."
"Don't you have to say it three times?"
Darcy snorted. "Like he'd ever be that inefficient. And yes. Him."
"A BAMF of many talents," Skye muttered to herself. Since Darcy suspected she wasn't supposed to hear it, she decided not to. "I should get back to the basement before I'm missed."
"Tell Agent Winters I think of him every time Dwerpy Hooves tops Apple Jack."
"What?"
"Not important." Darcy waved it off. "I'll put an order through for you to start upgrading security on the coms. In the meantime, don't be a stranger. This place needs a lot of reworking and I can't do it all myself."
*
Phil had intended to ask Darcy who IT had sent up to clear the hack but, in his defense, he'd spent two torturous hours on the phone with the mayor of New York – forty-seven minutes in, torture had begun to look preferable – and then been pulled immediately into a meeting with R&D who were still insisting the business with the duck had been an accident.
*
"...and the Russians have definitely got their panties in a knot about something."
"About what?" Darcy asked setting her tray on the table and dropping into the seat next to Kevin.
Who looked at her salad and chicken fingers and fruit salad then at her and said, "You're taking time for lunch?"
Darcy snorted. "Hey, if I have to stay here and attend the How To Read The Rare Mark Who Won't be Looking At My Boobs course..."
"It wasn't actually called that was it?" Kevin asked.
"No." Lori leaned across the table to steal one of Darcy's grapes.
"...instead of going with the boss, then I get a lunch break same as the other trainees."
"You're pouting," Lori pointed out. "It's unattractive."
"Actually," Kevin began, realized he was being glared at, and raised both hands in the air. "Never mind."
"It's Agent Coulson's first time handling the Avengers alone since he came back to work, isn't it?"
"It is." Darcy ate a cherry tomato and sighed. "Who's going to look out for him if I'm not there?"
"Um... the Avengers?"
"Please. Clint's been in medical so many times they have specific protocols for dealing with him. Tony gets injured often enough he had to turn a whole floor of the tower into Avengers Medical Support before Pepper'd let him out of the building. Thor and the Hulk are pretty much indestructible, and, of the two, during battle the Hulk is better at remembering Humans squish. And Steve not only has that whole super-soldier thing going – and don't get me wrong, I'm in favour of the fringe benefits – but he's all about saving the day and stopping the bleeding later – a belief system Agent Coulson unfortunately shares without the benefit of the super-soldier thing. Thank Thor for Natasha or I'd have stowed away in the cargo hold."
"Oooo," Kevin said.
"Natasha," Lori added.
Darcy sighed. "Seriously, that's what you're taking from that rant? That I use the Black Widow's name? I'm actually worried here, guys."
"Come on, Darce." Lori stole another grape. "You know Hawkeye would never let anything happen to Agent Coulson."
"Even Hawkeye can't see everything at once." She swung her fork, missed, and shifted the bowl out of reach. "Plus, he's still pretty pissed about the duck."
"I had nothing to do with it!" Kevin declared. The two women stared at him for a long moment. Ears pink, he picked up his coffee and muttered, "I wasn't even in the lab that day."
"Anyway..." Darcy waved a hand over her tray. "...lunch. And distraction. Russians? Panties? Knots?"
Lori glanced around, but the cafeteria was only about half full and, if given a choice, senior and junior agents both sat well away from a table of probies as though their status might rub off. Even if that probation only had ten days left to run. "So, I'm on chatter this week, right?" she began once she'd determined that no one was listening in. "I'm expecting the usual signal to noise ratio, but suddenly half a dozen old KGB channels went active. Mostly just call and respond stuff, but significantly more call than response."
Darcy pointed a half-eaten chicken finger across the table. "They're looking for something."
"Or someone," Kevin added, frowning at his forkful of coconut cream pie.
"That was the general consensus. But no one can figure out what." Lori finished her tea and set the empty mug down on the table with a sharp crack. "They've bounced the analysis upstairs and told us to flag everything that might be connected."
Kevin frowned. "But if they don't know what it's about..."
"Yeah." Lori sighed. "We're flagging everything. At this point, we could just send on the raw data."
They continued eating in silence. Darcy was just finishing her fruit salad – Kevin and Lori were revisiting the Deadpool: insane or eccentric argument – when Skye entered the cafeteria. Alone.
Either she'd finally been cleared for independent movement, or she'd ditched her babysitter again. Practically vibrating, she looked around, spotted Darcy, and headed over. "Can I talk to you?" she asked as she arrived.
Darcy nodded. "Sure. Have a seat. Oh, Skye from IT this is Lori and Kevin. We were all in the same intake group."
Skye shook her head. "I mean, alone. Sorry. Nothing personal."
"Hey, spies." Lori stood. "We get the whole secrets thing."
"I'm in R&D," Kevin protested, standing as well.
"For a sort of secret, kick-ass government spy agency," Darcy reminded him as Lori linked their arms and began steering him toward the door. "If they get back in time, we still on for Friday night?"
Lori shot her a thumbs up.
"Clubbing," Darcy explained to Skye's raised brow.
"Captain America goes clubbing?"
"No, but Steve Rogers does. I think he's trying to experience the modern equivalent of everything he couldn't do before the serum. Tony keeps giving him shit for loving techno, but he mostly loves the anonymity on the floor. And rhythmic sweating without collapsing." She took a moment to appreciate the memory of Steve all rhythmically sweaty, stopped before it got embarrassing, and smiled up at Skye. "So, sit."
"I don't..."
"Trust me, this is the best place in HQ to have a private conversation. The deli slicer interferes with sound pickup and there's no duct work over the tables big enough for a grown man. Just make sure no level twos or threes can see your mouth – level four needs basic lip reading and they're always practicing."
Syke glanced up at the ceiling and frowned. "How do I know who's a level two or three?" she asked, obviously deciding to ignore the whole grown man in the duct work thing. Since Clint was out Avenging, that wouldn't come back and bite her on the ass.
"Well, that's the trick. Probies – like you – are level one. Probies like me are level three with exceptions due to an accelerated work-study program because Agent Coulson needed an assistant ASAP. I'll probably remain a level three until the rest of my intake catches up, since those exceptions – like advanced lessons on the responsible uses of power and why you don't call civilians suicidal dumbasses even when they're standing in the street taking cell phone pictures of mutated, killer squirrels because their taxes pay your salary – have to be ticked off."
"This place is a nuthouse," Sky muttered, dropping into the seat
"You're not the first to make that observation. You're probably not the first to make that observation today." Darcy pushed her tray to one side. "So, this is me, all ears."
"Okay." Skye set her messenger bag on the table and wrapped her arms around it. "I was tracking the Hydra hack, trying to figure out if it's reoccurring because we're not clearing the system completely or because they've put in a back door – well, more like a back mouse hole; I like to think someone would have noticed a door – and I slid into a whole string of texts. Hydra's having a complete melt down. Asset missed target. Asset off grid. Asset no longer in DC. Asset needs re-calibration. Russians aware."
"Wait. Russians aware?"
"Yeah. Of the asset I assume, since that's all they're talking about."
"Okay." Darcy stood, scooping up her backpack and hanging it off one shoulder. "We need to tell someone about this."
"I told Agent Winter. He said if I continued sticking my digital nose in where it didn't belong, I'd find myself where I did belong. Then he added, jail, like he hadn't been obvious enough."
"We need to tell... no we can't, he's in Canada and he was quite clear about not being interrupted while in the field on his very first, insultingly easy..." She sketched air quotes around insultingly easy, although the boss was the only one who gave mechanized Sasquatch that description. "...just him and the Avengers mission, since being cleared for full duty. And Agent Sitwell is in Paraguay on an emergency am I the only level seven who speaks Paraguayan Guarani and Spanish for fucksake mission. And we'd better stay away from Agent Hill until she forgets about the duck."
"The..."
"Don't ask. Go get your coat, don't let anyone see you, and meet me outside the fake cubicle farm. Five minutes."
"Where are we going?"
"I'm escorting you out of the building for coffee so Agent Winter can't find you and haul you back under IT arrest before we work this out."
"Can you do that?" When Darcy raised a eyebrow at her, Skye shrugged. "Okay, five minutes."
*
Darcy was just zipping her poofy jacket when Skye reappeared looking a little too much like she was sneaking out of the building. Fortunately, the hall was empty. "It's only three floors, we'll take the stairs."
The stairwell was also empty so Darcy resettled the backpack over both shoulders and broke into a run, skipping the bottom three stairs in every half flight, landing knees flexed, Docs slamming against the concrete. Counting one and two under her breath, she grabbed the hand rail, pivoted around the curve, and threw herself down the next section. Yes, she was showing off for the scary-smart computer person. A little.
A month ago, coming down from the office, she'd managed five floors at full run and leap, then, legs tiring, had landed hard, hit herself in the chin with her knee, bit her tongue, rolled down the next seven steps, and ripped her pants.
The junior agents watching the security cameras had given her a 6.8. When she got home, Steve had joined her in a long, hot bath – there was plenty of room, a tub designed by Tony Stark could easily handle two super-soldiers and a nearly finished her probation probationary agent. He'd got her blissfully relaxed, dried her off, and then gently rubbed arnica cream over most of her body.
She was still pissed about the 6.8 though and, in spite of the coverage by her coat, blamed it on the damned bras Tony kept designing. He'd moved from comfortable and supportive to comfortable and supportive and sexy. Which was great and likely to make him billions and billions more dollars, but Darcy knew that with a little more jiggle, she could have easy bumped her score up a point or two.
This time, she stuck the landing and waited by the door that lead into the lobby.
Skye looked worried as she walked down the last few stairs. "Am I going to have start doing that? Because I really don't want to."
"No, it's a me thing. According to some people who will remain nameless but are both scary and Russian, the 5K morning run..." Steve kept going after dropping her back at the tower. Darcy had no idea how far he went although she suspected that, once or twice, he'd gone to New Jersey. "...isn't enough variation in my cardio." Clint said he'd start her on parkour the moment Natasha agreed she wouldn't die first time out.
Skye's worry morphed to confusion. In fairness, Darcy got that a lot. "Don't you have a desk job?"
"Nope. I have an Avengers job. I have to be field certified, and I can't be tested until after the official end of probation which is in ten days. If I pass, I'll be a junior agent. Yay." Her fist pump had the amount of energy junior agent deserved. Which was to say, not much. "Let's go."
"Why don't we leave that way?" Skye asked, pointing toward the airlock entry leading out to the street.
"Fire exit only," Darcy told her. "And when SHIELD says fire exit only, they mean only. Open it when fire protocols aren't engaged and you'll get trapped between the doors, gassed, and left tied, unconscious in an elevator with a sign around your neck that says unable to read at a grade two level. And that's if the agents who retrieve you like you."
"I'm pretty sure that's against any number of workplace safety and harassment laws," Skye muttered, frowning.
"Welcome to a government job; they don't have to follow their own rules."
"Which is why we – and when I say we, I mean the Rising Tide which I'm not longer in any way associated with – want to bring the government down."
"Welcome to SHIELD; we're all about stopping that. On a macro, mad scientist, invading aliens kind of way."
After a moment, Skye shrugged. "Beats jail."
"Most days," Darcy agreed.