Fic prompt: Darcy and the Avengers

showgirlsteve:

“Darcy is not a professional scientist slash superhero
wrangler,” Jane frequently reminds the Avengers. “Her degree is in political
science, and her experience is in assisting
me.  She’s my assistant!”

Usually this is when Jane
gets the same look in her eyes as she does when she’s low on caffeine and about
to have a breakthrough, and whoever wants to borrow Darcy slowly backs away.
(My Darcy mine, say
Jane’s eyes. My coffee mine,
Jane’s eyes tell Clint. My research, mine,
Jane’s eyes scream any time a SHIELD agent wanders close to her lab. Jane is
usually mild mannered but she has a core of steel – a possessive core of steel
– and it shows.)

Darcy is very attached to Jane, herself. She would not have
followed Jane, who followed Thor, who followed his team, all the way to New
York, if she wasn’t.

Darcy, being a political science major, not a physicist, is less
attached to Jane’s work. Also, sneaking away from Jane’s lab gives her a tiny
rebellious thrill.

And she wasn’t always a political science major. She started her
college career as a hospitality major. And at one point she was a business
management major. Both totally applicable
to herding superheroes and scientists.

So sometimes Darcy lets herself get stolen away from Jane.

She isn’t a superhero wrangler, and she isn’t a scientist or a
scientist wrangler, but sometimes, sometimes,
she sorts out Hawkeye’s mess of a life for a the next five minutes, or
remembers to pick up the Black Widow’s favorite tea when she’s across town
running an errand for Bruce Banner who can’t step away from an important
experiment. Sometimes Thor smiles at her with the light of a star and Pepper
Potts trusts her enough to drag Tony Stark away from his tinkering in time for
a press interview.

Darcy isn’t changing the world, but when she gets asked about
what she’s doing with her life? She’s not ashamed to answer.

“Officially,” she tells them. “I’m an assistant for the leading
astrophysicist in the world. But sometimes? Sometimes, I get to babysit the
Avengers, too.”