@amusewithaview You beautiful, horrible, brilliant person you
Darcy never regretted not telling Jane about those untransferred mechanical engineering credits from freshman year. Nor did she ever second guess continuing to use her mom’s maiden name to keep everyone from realizing she was just another of the many prodigy burnouts. And she never felt any guilt about not explaining just how much she really understood about Jane’s work or just how many machines she’d tweaked. Because if the woman really hadn’t noticed by now, what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her and no one else had applied to the internship anyway. So Darcy didn’t regret any of it.
Until the day the Fantiastic Four walked into their swanky new lab in the Tower. All of them, including one fiery, unfortunately even hotter than she remembered, former near-fiancee of hers.
“Shit, shit, shit” she muttered trying to duck her head down and hide the fact that she was consciously trying to avoid hyperventilating.
Her desk was open so she couldn’t hide underneath. The door was too far. And she was pretty sure the rock guy had heard her cursing since he glanced her way and tilted his head.
It was a done deal. There was no way of avoiding him.
Jane was in full ‘come behold my brilliance ye former doubters ye’ tour mode. And the run-in had been inevitable considering the kind of hero/genius society she kept. But really. This was her lab. Her home. Why the hell was he walking in as if he belonged there in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon? Walking toward her desk with everyone else as if every inch of blessed space between her blessedly safe new life and sad old one weren’t rapidly disappearing.
“And this is my assistant extraordinaire, Darcy Lewis.”
She exchanged pleasantries with Sue, Reed, and Ben, purposely avoiding Johnny as long as she could. But before she could play damage control, he happily let the cat out of the bag like the douche she knew he’d become.
“Lewis? I thought it was Lee?”
And when Darcy looked at him, caught that tell-tale crease forming at the right corner of his mouth, she knew. He’d known exactly who he’d find when he’d come into that lab today.
“Isn’t that your middle name?” Jane asked, face scrunching up, undoubtedly worried that no matter how many times she’d been introducing her, she’d confused it in when in Science! mode.
“I switched them when I went to Culver,” Darcy said. She wasn’t about to get into all that right then. Especially not with their current audience.
“Good thing you introduced us, Dr. Foster,” Johnny continued, same dickish smile in place as he purposely looked at her oversized lab cardigan and t-shirt, safety boots, and grimey hair she’d pulled into the messiest of buns while she finished moving the last of their equipment into their new space. By the time he made it back to her eyes, that dickish tilt of his lips had turned into a full dickish grin. “I almost didn’t recognize you, Darce.”
Feeling her polite smile getting brittle, Darcy shrugged and tried to put some reluctance into her expression as she looked at their other guests. “Not to ditch you all, but Jane’s Science! baby #2 is acting up since the move, so I’m gonna head to the store and get replacement parts since Stark isn’t allowed to touch our things and insists we give him a proper demonstration later.”
“Oh, yes, thanks!” Jane said but immediately began to describe the phenomena they were going to try and demonstrate.
Beating a hasty retreat, Darcy grabbed her stuff and shuffled toward the doors.
“See you later, Lee,” Johnny called after her.
She lifted one hand in an defeated wave for a response and kept going, very proud of herself for not turning it into a one-finger salute. And also for not bothering to look back at all. Johnny was in the past. She’d burned that bridge long ago. And he seemed perfectly ready to torch, no pun intended, anything that was left.
So she didn’t look back. But she also didn’t notice how Johnny’s eyes followed her all the way to the door and through the windows of the hallway until she was out of sight.
