bungakertas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bungakertas) wrote2014-01-28 10:02 am
bungakertas) wrote2014-01-28 10:02 am
Entry tags:
Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 4
Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 4
Disclaimer and general author's notes are in the first chapter, which is linked at the bottom.
*~*~*
New Mexico was hot, sandy, dry, and apparently infested with rednecks as well as aliens. The alien artifact was surrounded by people tailgating and trying to pull it out of the rock it was embedded in. It took the better part of a day to get rid of them all.
The 0-8-4 turned out to be a hammer and the rednecks had been annoying, but they were right. It was interesting. Apparently nobody could pull it out of that rock. No amount of pressure or torque was sufficient to move that hammer from where it was. That was odd. (Two cadets, who were apparently prodigies even for SHIELD, had been requisitioned from SciTech, and they used words like “impossible,” “brilliant,” and “gloriously unbelievable.” Phil was not impressed with their technobabble, but he was impressed with their work, so he made a mental note of their names.)
He had to give several of their scientists (not the cadets, because they didn’t need it) his very best death glare, but they were able to come up with the residual energy from a wormhole (definitely the strangest job in the government) that came from…they weren’t sure where. The science team also informed him that there had been a second event at the same time, and that there was somebody else out here studying these things.
Which meant he was going to have to go ruin somebody’s day.
He put together a clean-up team the next morning and tracked down this other team’s movements. It actually took him an hour to figure out who and where they were, not because any of them seemed particularly skilled at staying off the grid, but because they apparently worked mostly out of a van and couldn’t afford up-to-date equipment.
So he was ruining some independent team of hardworking people’s day. Lovely.
They arrived to find no one at their lab, so he had the team start loading the equipment into their trucks. He started seizing personal items, including a very nice iPod that was probably not going to survive their inspection. This part of the job was his least favorite.
They were just finishing up putting the last of the heavy equipment up three very irate people ran up to them. One of them, a woman, instantly began shouting at him.
“What the hell is going on here?”
From the pictures he’d seen, this was Jane Foster. “Ms. Foster, I’m Agent Coulson, with SHIELD.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me? You can’t do this!” she yelled.
The older man, who Phil identified as Erik Selvig, ran up to her and laid a hand on her arm. “Jane,” he said warningly, “Jane, this is a lot more serious than we realized. Let it go.”
“Let it go?” Foster snapped, turning back to Phil. “This is my life!”
Knowing she would not appreciate what he said, Phil replied, “We’re investigating a security threat. We need to appropriate your records and all your atmospheric data.”
“By ‘appropriate’ do you mean ‘steal?’”
She made to pull something out of one of their vans and was stopped by one of his agents. Phil nodded at the man to let her go and handed her a check. “Here. This should more than compensate you for your troubles.”
Throughout the whole of this interaction, the third person with them had been silent, but she was easily recognizable as Darcy Lewis.
Lewis’ file had been almost inspiring. A morning woman, a political science major from Central New Mexico Community College. She was in her late twenties, since she’d started late after saving for several years to afford it. She was a happy person who worked hard to earn what she wanted. It was her iPod he’d taken. One of her only luxuries.
Foster was not impressed with the money. “I can’t just buy replacements at Radio Shack. I made most of this equipment myself!” She brandished a notebook at him.
“Then you can do it again.”
“And I’m sure I can sue you for violating my Constitutional rights.”
Phil did not mention the extreme latitude things like the Patriot Act gave him in terms of what those rights actually were. It would only escalate the situation, aside from being totally unfair at this juncture. Instead, he said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Foster. But we’re the good guys.”
“So are we! I’m on the verge of understanding something…extraordinary.”
And that was exactly why he was doing this, Phil thought.
“Everything I know about this phenomenon is either in this lab, or in this book, and you can’t just take this away—”
One of Phil’s agents came by and did exactly that to her notebook.
“Hey!”
That, apparently, was the last straw for Foster who went after the agent with the clear intention of physically reacquiring her book. But Selvig instantly leaped in to pull her back, and Phil understood the impulse so he was not about to charge her for anything.
They had finished loading up her lab, and everyone began climbing into their vehicles. Phil turned to her a little sadly and said, “Thank you for your cooperation.” Then he climbed into his own seat.
Least favorite part of the job.
He returned to their relatively quiet temporary facility where they started going through Foster’s equipment and notes. And according to the SciTech agents, she was quite good.
He initially dismissed this as just another part of the mutual love-fest the scientists always seemed to have going for their peers, but the woman said, “Sir, I don’t think you understand. If she were working with SHIELD’s equipment, she might be able to tell us where these wormholes originated. Eventually, she might be able to reverse the process from our end.”
“She’s that good?”
“She’s that good. She’s not Stark or Banner, but she’s been working on this for so long that even they might not be able to work these problems as fast as her. She just understands the events.”
“Should we bring her on as a consultant?” Phil said.
“If you don’t recommend it, sir, I will.”
Phil was going to reply when a rumble of thunder sounded from outside. At least three people instantly pulled their phones out and started checking weather reports. Apparently the meteorologists missed something. He turned and headed for his office.
He was halfway there when an alarm started blaring and a voice announced that there was a perimeter breach. He turned and began heading for the security center when the skies above him opened up.
He watched with no small degree of surprise as one intruder cut through their entire security force in a violent thunderstorm to get to the 0-8-4. And something about the purposeful way he moved for it (and also the way he didn’t kill anyone getting there) made Phil curious enough to tell Barton not to stop him reaching it.
Everyone was a little disappointed when he couldn’t lift the 0-8-4, either.
He was deeply inscrutable when interviewed. He did not so much as flinch when threatened. And he was sad. So very, oddly, sad. By the time they’d finished talking, the sky was absolutely clear again.
Phil was relatively astonished when none other than Erik Selvig arrived to attempt to bail their intruder out. He named the man as “Donald Blake,” (which was quickly flagged as false) and spun a rather fantastic tail involving steroids and drunken impulses.
He’d known that Foster was chasing down their phenomenon. To find out that her group was also tangled up in the man who’d attacked their compound was quite the surprise. So, rather than throwing them both in jail (which was tempting after the comment about “jackbooted thugs”), he had them followed. Barton, who was equally curious about them, volunteered.
“Donald” was apparently well able to hold a drink and Selvig, though not a cheap drunk, could not keep up. This was the only information that following them acquired. Beyond that, they did absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever. Phil was halfway to seeking out whoever was running the betting pool on this and putting some money down himself. Donald’s behavior was downright bizarre. Why break into the compound in the first place if he had no intentions of actually trying to use the 0-8-4? How did he know the 0-8-4 was significant anyway? And what, exactly, did it do?
The next day, someone radioed in an appearance from “Xena, Jackie Chan, and Robin Hood.” They and a fourth individual, eventually given the codename of “Gimli,” visited Foster and Donald. So he had the agents who’d radioed the new arrivals keep an eye on them. But, in the meantime, when the four newcomers had arrived from yet another wormhole, the SHIELD team had caught the event and had been able to pinpoint exactly where it had deposited them. Phil took a team out to the site to find a huge circle on the ground with some kind of endless knot design inside it. Which was more than odd enough on its own. But then a shower of rainbow-colored light started pouring out of the sky and an enormous metal suit emerged from it.
This day was getting very, very strange.
“Is that one of Stark’s?” another agent asked from beside him.
Phil looked it over. It didn’t look like something Tony would build. There weren’t nearly enough moving parts, and it was colored a very functional silver. Still, Tony did like to tinker. But when would he have had the time to build this? Then again, he built the first Iron Man suit in an Afghani cave, surrounded by terrorists, out of spare parts.
“I don’t think so,” Phil finally shrugged. “He was working on something else when I left him.”
As it turned out, he was right. The suit was not one of Stark’s. Because Phil was completely confident that Tony would not build anything that would attack his team the way that this thing did. And as soon as they were out of its way, the thing started making a beeline for the town.
The town full of people.
They pulled each other up, piled into the vans they had remaining after the attack, and gunned the engines for Main Street.
They pulled to a stop just as a tornado (What?) was dissipating from view. They didn’t miss Donald striding out of the tornado, however, wearing some kind of silver armor and a red cape. And he had thought Tony’s smoking jacket was over the top.
In Donald’s hand was the 0-8-4, and something about his expression led Phil to believe that he was about to just go running off.
“Excuse me!” Phil shouted, stalking up to their erstwhile intruder. “I don’t think you’ve been completely honest with me. Donald.” He saw eyebrows go up from the four new people. And given what they were wearing, he could see why they had been given those codenames. Foster and her two friends were also there, and also looked like he had just said something potentially insulting. Those three seemed to be in the middle of everything out here. Debriefing them was going to be interesting, to say the least. Maybe then he would finally get some answers as to just what was going on around here.
Donald ignored his statement and said, “Know this, Son of Coul, you and I? We fight for the same cause. The protection of this world.”
The shambles of the town around them made his statement hard to swallow, but Phil was curious where he was going with it. And he had to admit that “Son of Coul” was absolutely the best nickname he had ever been given.
“From this day forward, you can count me as your ally, if you return the items you have taken from Jane.” He stepped back to bring Foster into their conversation.
“Stolen,” she corrected, obviously not willing to forgive him.
“Borrowed,” Phil replied. And, he had been planning to recommend her for a consultation post anyway. This just gave him an even better reason so he continued, “Of course you can have your equipment back. You’re going to need it to continue your research.”
Foster smiled. Then Donald stepped even closer to her and said, “Would you like to see the bridge we spoke of?”
“Sure,” she replied.
Donald wrapped a hand around her waist, and over Phil’s protests, he actually took off into the sky under his own power.
The four new visitors looked unsurprised by this and took off running towards the spot where the metal suit had first appeared. Phil had a feeling he should probably be trying to get them to agree to a debrief, but he was staring at the sky, too stunned to put a coherent sentence together at the moment.
“Maybe I should start eating PopTarts,” a wry voice commented beside him.
“Why?” Phil asked, without looking over.
“It’s what he had for breakfast,” the voice answered.
Phil glanced down to see Darcy Lewis standing there, still staring at the sky.
“I guess they worked,” she said. She looked at him and offered her hand. “Darcy Lewis. I didn’t catch your name in all the government-backed theft earlier.”
“Agent Phil Coulson,” he said, shaking it. “I will have to debrief the two of you.”
“Debrief?”
“You need to tell me what happened over the past few days.”
“That’s a long story,” Selvig said, apparently shaking off his own surprise.
“I assure you both, I will make the time for it.” He looked over the town again. “Who do you know that was hurt?”
“I didn’t see anyone harmed,” Selvig answered.
“What?”
“When we saw that thing coming, we got as many people away from here as we could,” Lewis told him. “I guess that worked, too.” She looked smugly satisfied with herself. Phil did not roll his eyes because it had been exactly the right thing to do and he had no intention of discouraging that.
Phil looked at the wreckage of the metal suit that was not only not Stark tech, but not even Earth tech. He knew some scientists and weapons designers at SHIELD who were going to have very gleeful heart attacks at the prospect of being able to examine this.
The debriefs were interesting. Apparently “Donald Blake” was really Thor, straight out of Norse mythology. (The Thor? “Strangest job in the government” didn’t begin to cover this.) Returning Foster’s equipment to her and signing her up to SHIELD was no problem. Some of the personal items were harder. Lewis’ iPod had been taken apart by the SHIELD examiners, and she was decidedly displeased not to get it back. Even if they did hand her a check big enough to buy a newer model.
She seemed bizarrely more disappointed than disapproving, and that felt awful. The iPod hadn’t just been a thing, it had been one of the few nice things Lewis could afford. She was a completely innocent bystander in all this, and it was unfair. They had made a back-up of her music library, though, and he was pleased to be able to give that to her. Which did seem to cheer her some. As did the debriefing. Apparently she had tased Thor at one point, and was very smug about being able to use electricity to take out someone who was historically the God of Lighting.
When he finished the wrap-up in Puente Antigua, he went to bed. It had been a colossally terrible day, but at least it was over.
When he got up the next morning, he read the news. Tony had made the front page. Again.
Phil raced to New York, somewhat pointlessly, given that the whole situation was resolved now and neither Tony nor Pepper were in danger anymore. But it didn’t feel pointless when he arrived because JARVIS opened the door to Tony’s ridiculously expensive penthouse before he could knock, and Tony and Pepper treated him to dinner. When Tony went into his workshop for a few hours afterwards, Pepper took the opportunity to yell at him for not telling her about Tony’s condition, then cry on his shoulder.
Phil hadn’t expected to see Lewis again regularly (or really at all), but someone (Foster) hadn’t had the right equipment to move her cobbled-together lab to SHIELD’s new office for her, and someone else (Tony) had decided that they should use Stark Industries resources to go get it when somebody (Phil) had explained the problem to him. Which someone else (Pepper) had refused to approve unless the person that wanted those resources (Tony) personally oversaw the retrieval. Foster was busy setting up some things in her new lab, Selvig had been appropriated by Fury for something that even Phil was not allowed to know about, and that left Lewis overseeing the old lab by herself.
So when Tony showed up to get all the old equipment, he met Darcy Lewis. In person.
The two of them bonded immediately (of course they did), and apparently spent the trip to the new lab (in Albuquerque) swapping music and arguing about which of Tony’s many scandals had generated the best headlines. Apparently Tony liked the puns on DrudgeReport after he’d picked up Senator Stern’s son at a military ball. Darcy had preferred the flowchart explanations for Tony sleeping his way through NFL cheerleading squads. When they arrived, they left all the lab equipment for Foster to sort through (properly stored, but still packed), and proceeded to the nearest bar where they apparently got totally smashed but didn’t do anything more embarrassing than sing bad karaoke too loudly. Clearly Lewis was something of a moderating influence on Tony, which was an interesting discovery. There was video of the two of them still singing “You Give Love A Bad Name” as Tony checked them into the swankiest hotel in Albuquerque (which actually was pretty swanky, despite being in New Mexico).
If Lewis hadn’t been morning moiety, Phil would have been very jealous.
When Tony had gone back to New York, he’d brought Lewis with him. And the two of them proceeded to be photographed in all the major tourist locations, usually doing things that—while they didn’t hurt anyone—eventually got them thrown out. On one particularly memorable occasion, they were escorted out of the Met after using Command Strips to hang beautifully framed children’s drawings, complete with little title plates, in the blank spaces on the walls. Apparently they’d spent some time getting kids under the age of five to contribute the art. Most of the drawings involved Iron Man in one way or another. (The museum took all the pictures down, but did not destroy them. Instead, they mailed them to Tony, who was now having them shipped to his various properties.)
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Pepper ranted to him one night, as she mixed a mimosa. “It’s like they’re a double act now! And, don’t get me wrong, I love that Darcy can apparently rein in his worst impulses. I don’t think he’s been drunk in public once in the past month.”
Phil nodded. “But she does indulge all of his not-necessarily-good impulses to their full extent.”
There was a long moment of quiet before Pepper finally said, “She is gorgeous, though.”
Phil did not reply to that. He was trying (unsuccessfully) not to notice. He wasn’t sure if Darcy really liked him.
Tony, being himself, gave Lewis full access to a jet so that she could fly back and forth from New Mexico and then sent her dozens of texts when she didn’t come up on weekends. Which is why Phil occasionally found her wandering through Tony’s penthouse at 10:30 AM.
In pajamas.
And, okay, so it was long pants and a tee-shirt, so it wasn’t like this was something out of some lurid romance novel where she always slept in slinky silks. But she was beautiful and young and interesting and funny and he was not made of stone.
He tried focusing on his bagels.
She was either oblivious to his awkwardness or didn’t care, because she sat down across from him. “Have you heard anything more from Thor?”
“No. Though, given the damage his visit did, that may be for the best,” Phil answered.
“He’s not a bad guy,” she pointed out.
“People don’t have to be bad to be dangerous,” Phil pointed out.
Darcy munched absently on a PopTart and did not disagree.
Unable to help himself, Phil said, “When did you know Thor was an alien?”
“Jane figured it out first. Erik dragged his feet. I went with Jane mostly ‘cause I thought it’d be cool if he was,” Darcy answered.
“‘Thought?’ You don’t think so any more?”
“No, I still do, but I’m also confused now. I mean, you noticed he’s morning, right?”
“And if he’s an alien, why does he have a moiety at all?” It was a good question. One he’d been struggling with, too.
“It’s driving me nuts,” Darcy agreed. “I’d be worried that the Asgardians had influenced how we marry, but the sedoretu predates recorded human history, so it’s from before they had contact with us.”
“Did we influence how they marry?”
“That would mean Thor had no moiety when he visited Earth two thousand years ago, and then became morning over the course of his lifetime, and that’s not how it works.”
Phil blinked. Darcy had obviously put a lot of thought into this.
After a moment, she shrugged. “Aliens are weird. Thor said he was coming back, so maybe I’ll get the chance to ask him. Maybe he’ll even bring some more people along, for comparison.”
“It might be nice to meet another Asgardian,” Phil agreed. He looked back at his bagels and didn’t say more. (Dork!)
*~*~*
Author’s Notes: I do not remember where I saw “Gimli” as a codename for Volstagg. It was another fanfic, and I remember enjoying it. If anyone does know off the top of their head, let me know so that I can link people.
DrudgeReport.com is a news aggregator website, and actually does love puns. A lot. If you weren’t reading their headlines during the Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger thing, you missed out. I swear there was one that said “Weiner Remains Firm” linking to an article about him not dropping out of the election.
Chapter One - First Meetings
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Five - Balance
Chapter Six - Tesseract
Chapter Seven - Tahiti
Disclaimer and general author's notes are in the first chapter, which is linked at the bottom.
New Mexico was hot, sandy, dry, and apparently infested with rednecks as well as aliens. The alien artifact was surrounded by people tailgating and trying to pull it out of the rock it was embedded in. It took the better part of a day to get rid of them all.
The 0-8-4 turned out to be a hammer and the rednecks had been annoying, but they were right. It was interesting. Apparently nobody could pull it out of that rock. No amount of pressure or torque was sufficient to move that hammer from where it was. That was odd. (Two cadets, who were apparently prodigies even for SHIELD, had been requisitioned from SciTech, and they used words like “impossible,” “brilliant,” and “gloriously unbelievable.” Phil was not impressed with their technobabble, but he was impressed with their work, so he made a mental note of their names.)
He had to give several of their scientists (not the cadets, because they didn’t need it) his very best death glare, but they were able to come up with the residual energy from a wormhole (definitely the strangest job in the government) that came from…they weren’t sure where. The science team also informed him that there had been a second event at the same time, and that there was somebody else out here studying these things.
Which meant he was going to have to go ruin somebody’s day.
He put together a clean-up team the next morning and tracked down this other team’s movements. It actually took him an hour to figure out who and where they were, not because any of them seemed particularly skilled at staying off the grid, but because they apparently worked mostly out of a van and couldn’t afford up-to-date equipment.
So he was ruining some independent team of hardworking people’s day. Lovely.
They arrived to find no one at their lab, so he had the team start loading the equipment into their trucks. He started seizing personal items, including a very nice iPod that was probably not going to survive their inspection. This part of the job was his least favorite.
They were just finishing up putting the last of the heavy equipment up three very irate people ran up to them. One of them, a woman, instantly began shouting at him.
“What the hell is going on here?”
From the pictures he’d seen, this was Jane Foster. “Ms. Foster, I’m Agent Coulson, with SHIELD.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me? You can’t do this!” she yelled.
The older man, who Phil identified as Erik Selvig, ran up to her and laid a hand on her arm. “Jane,” he said warningly, “Jane, this is a lot more serious than we realized. Let it go.”
“Let it go?” Foster snapped, turning back to Phil. “This is my life!”
Knowing she would not appreciate what he said, Phil replied, “We’re investigating a security threat. We need to appropriate your records and all your atmospheric data.”
“By ‘appropriate’ do you mean ‘steal?’”
She made to pull something out of one of their vans and was stopped by one of his agents. Phil nodded at the man to let her go and handed her a check. “Here. This should more than compensate you for your troubles.”
Throughout the whole of this interaction, the third person with them had been silent, but she was easily recognizable as Darcy Lewis.
Lewis’ file had been almost inspiring. A morning woman, a political science major from Central New Mexico Community College. She was in her late twenties, since she’d started late after saving for several years to afford it. She was a happy person who worked hard to earn what she wanted. It was her iPod he’d taken. One of her only luxuries.
Foster was not impressed with the money. “I can’t just buy replacements at Radio Shack. I made most of this equipment myself!” She brandished a notebook at him.
“Then you can do it again.”
“And I’m sure I can sue you for violating my Constitutional rights.”
Phil did not mention the extreme latitude things like the Patriot Act gave him in terms of what those rights actually were. It would only escalate the situation, aside from being totally unfair at this juncture. Instead, he said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Foster. But we’re the good guys.”
“So are we! I’m on the verge of understanding something…extraordinary.”
And that was exactly why he was doing this, Phil thought.
“Everything I know about this phenomenon is either in this lab, or in this book, and you can’t just take this away—”
One of Phil’s agents came by and did exactly that to her notebook.
“Hey!”
That, apparently, was the last straw for Foster who went after the agent with the clear intention of physically reacquiring her book. But Selvig instantly leaped in to pull her back, and Phil understood the impulse so he was not about to charge her for anything.
They had finished loading up her lab, and everyone began climbing into their vehicles. Phil turned to her a little sadly and said, “Thank you for your cooperation.” Then he climbed into his own seat.
Least favorite part of the job.
He returned to their relatively quiet temporary facility where they started going through Foster’s equipment and notes. And according to the SciTech agents, she was quite good.
He initially dismissed this as just another part of the mutual love-fest the scientists always seemed to have going for their peers, but the woman said, “Sir, I don’t think you understand. If she were working with SHIELD’s equipment, she might be able to tell us where these wormholes originated. Eventually, she might be able to reverse the process from our end.”
“She’s that good?”
“She’s that good. She’s not Stark or Banner, but she’s been working on this for so long that even they might not be able to work these problems as fast as her. She just understands the events.”
“Should we bring her on as a consultant?” Phil said.
“If you don’t recommend it, sir, I will.”
Phil was going to reply when a rumble of thunder sounded from outside. At least three people instantly pulled their phones out and started checking weather reports. Apparently the meteorologists missed something. He turned and headed for his office.
He was halfway there when an alarm started blaring and a voice announced that there was a perimeter breach. He turned and began heading for the security center when the skies above him opened up.
He watched with no small degree of surprise as one intruder cut through their entire security force in a violent thunderstorm to get to the 0-8-4. And something about the purposeful way he moved for it (and also the way he didn’t kill anyone getting there) made Phil curious enough to tell Barton not to stop him reaching it.
Everyone was a little disappointed when he couldn’t lift the 0-8-4, either.
He was deeply inscrutable when interviewed. He did not so much as flinch when threatened. And he was sad. So very, oddly, sad. By the time they’d finished talking, the sky was absolutely clear again.
Phil was relatively astonished when none other than Erik Selvig arrived to attempt to bail their intruder out. He named the man as “Donald Blake,” (which was quickly flagged as false) and spun a rather fantastic tail involving steroids and drunken impulses.
He’d known that Foster was chasing down their phenomenon. To find out that her group was also tangled up in the man who’d attacked their compound was quite the surprise. So, rather than throwing them both in jail (which was tempting after the comment about “jackbooted thugs”), he had them followed. Barton, who was equally curious about them, volunteered.
“Donald” was apparently well able to hold a drink and Selvig, though not a cheap drunk, could not keep up. This was the only information that following them acquired. Beyond that, they did absolutely nothing interesting whatsoever. Phil was halfway to seeking out whoever was running the betting pool on this and putting some money down himself. Donald’s behavior was downright bizarre. Why break into the compound in the first place if he had no intentions of actually trying to use the 0-8-4? How did he know the 0-8-4 was significant anyway? And what, exactly, did it do?
The next day, someone radioed in an appearance from “Xena, Jackie Chan, and Robin Hood.” They and a fourth individual, eventually given the codename of “Gimli,” visited Foster and Donald. So he had the agents who’d radioed the new arrivals keep an eye on them. But, in the meantime, when the four newcomers had arrived from yet another wormhole, the SHIELD team had caught the event and had been able to pinpoint exactly where it had deposited them. Phil took a team out to the site to find a huge circle on the ground with some kind of endless knot design inside it. Which was more than odd enough on its own. But then a shower of rainbow-colored light started pouring out of the sky and an enormous metal suit emerged from it.
This day was getting very, very strange.
“Is that one of Stark’s?” another agent asked from beside him.
Phil looked it over. It didn’t look like something Tony would build. There weren’t nearly enough moving parts, and it was colored a very functional silver. Still, Tony did like to tinker. But when would he have had the time to build this? Then again, he built the first Iron Man suit in an Afghani cave, surrounded by terrorists, out of spare parts.
“I don’t think so,” Phil finally shrugged. “He was working on something else when I left him.”
As it turned out, he was right. The suit was not one of Stark’s. Because Phil was completely confident that Tony would not build anything that would attack his team the way that this thing did. And as soon as they were out of its way, the thing started making a beeline for the town.
The town full of people.
They pulled each other up, piled into the vans they had remaining after the attack, and gunned the engines for Main Street.
They pulled to a stop just as a tornado (What?) was dissipating from view. They didn’t miss Donald striding out of the tornado, however, wearing some kind of silver armor and a red cape. And he had thought Tony’s smoking jacket was over the top.
In Donald’s hand was the 0-8-4, and something about his expression led Phil to believe that he was about to just go running off.
“Excuse me!” Phil shouted, stalking up to their erstwhile intruder. “I don’t think you’ve been completely honest with me. Donald.” He saw eyebrows go up from the four new people. And given what they were wearing, he could see why they had been given those codenames. Foster and her two friends were also there, and also looked like he had just said something potentially insulting. Those three seemed to be in the middle of everything out here. Debriefing them was going to be interesting, to say the least. Maybe then he would finally get some answers as to just what was going on around here.
Donald ignored his statement and said, “Know this, Son of Coul, you and I? We fight for the same cause. The protection of this world.”
The shambles of the town around them made his statement hard to swallow, but Phil was curious where he was going with it. And he had to admit that “Son of Coul” was absolutely the best nickname he had ever been given.
“From this day forward, you can count me as your ally, if you return the items you have taken from Jane.” He stepped back to bring Foster into their conversation.
“Stolen,” she corrected, obviously not willing to forgive him.
“Borrowed,” Phil replied. And, he had been planning to recommend her for a consultation post anyway. This just gave him an even better reason so he continued, “Of course you can have your equipment back. You’re going to need it to continue your research.”
Foster smiled. Then Donald stepped even closer to her and said, “Would you like to see the bridge we spoke of?”
“Sure,” she replied.
Donald wrapped a hand around her waist, and over Phil’s protests, he actually took off into the sky under his own power.
The four new visitors looked unsurprised by this and took off running towards the spot where the metal suit had first appeared. Phil had a feeling he should probably be trying to get them to agree to a debrief, but he was staring at the sky, too stunned to put a coherent sentence together at the moment.
“Maybe I should start eating PopTarts,” a wry voice commented beside him.
“Why?” Phil asked, without looking over.
“It’s what he had for breakfast,” the voice answered.
Phil glanced down to see Darcy Lewis standing there, still staring at the sky.
“I guess they worked,” she said. She looked at him and offered her hand. “Darcy Lewis. I didn’t catch your name in all the government-backed theft earlier.”
“Agent Phil Coulson,” he said, shaking it. “I will have to debrief the two of you.”
“Debrief?”
“You need to tell me what happened over the past few days.”
“That’s a long story,” Selvig said, apparently shaking off his own surprise.
“I assure you both, I will make the time for it.” He looked over the town again. “Who do you know that was hurt?”
“I didn’t see anyone harmed,” Selvig answered.
“What?”
“When we saw that thing coming, we got as many people away from here as we could,” Lewis told him. “I guess that worked, too.” She looked smugly satisfied with herself. Phil did not roll his eyes because it had been exactly the right thing to do and he had no intention of discouraging that.
Phil looked at the wreckage of the metal suit that was not only not Stark tech, but not even Earth tech. He knew some scientists and weapons designers at SHIELD who were going to have very gleeful heart attacks at the prospect of being able to examine this.
The debriefs were interesting. Apparently “Donald Blake” was really Thor, straight out of Norse mythology. (The Thor? “Strangest job in the government” didn’t begin to cover this.) Returning Foster’s equipment to her and signing her up to SHIELD was no problem. Some of the personal items were harder. Lewis’ iPod had been taken apart by the SHIELD examiners, and she was decidedly displeased not to get it back. Even if they did hand her a check big enough to buy a newer model.
She seemed bizarrely more disappointed than disapproving, and that felt awful. The iPod hadn’t just been a thing, it had been one of the few nice things Lewis could afford. She was a completely innocent bystander in all this, and it was unfair. They had made a back-up of her music library, though, and he was pleased to be able to give that to her. Which did seem to cheer her some. As did the debriefing. Apparently she had tased Thor at one point, and was very smug about being able to use electricity to take out someone who was historically the God of Lighting.
When he finished the wrap-up in Puente Antigua, he went to bed. It had been a colossally terrible day, but at least it was over.
When he got up the next morning, he read the news. Tony had made the front page. Again.
Phil raced to New York, somewhat pointlessly, given that the whole situation was resolved now and neither Tony nor Pepper were in danger anymore. But it didn’t feel pointless when he arrived because JARVIS opened the door to Tony’s ridiculously expensive penthouse before he could knock, and Tony and Pepper treated him to dinner. When Tony went into his workshop for a few hours afterwards, Pepper took the opportunity to yell at him for not telling her about Tony’s condition, then cry on his shoulder.
Phil hadn’t expected to see Lewis again regularly (or really at all), but someone (Foster) hadn’t had the right equipment to move her cobbled-together lab to SHIELD’s new office for her, and someone else (Tony) had decided that they should use Stark Industries resources to go get it when somebody (Phil) had explained the problem to him. Which someone else (Pepper) had refused to approve unless the person that wanted those resources (Tony) personally oversaw the retrieval. Foster was busy setting up some things in her new lab, Selvig had been appropriated by Fury for something that even Phil was not allowed to know about, and that left Lewis overseeing the old lab by herself.
So when Tony showed up to get all the old equipment, he met Darcy Lewis. In person.
The two of them bonded immediately (of course they did), and apparently spent the trip to the new lab (in Albuquerque) swapping music and arguing about which of Tony’s many scandals had generated the best headlines. Apparently Tony liked the puns on DrudgeReport after he’d picked up Senator Stern’s son at a military ball. Darcy had preferred the flowchart explanations for Tony sleeping his way through NFL cheerleading squads. When they arrived, they left all the lab equipment for Foster to sort through (properly stored, but still packed), and proceeded to the nearest bar where they apparently got totally smashed but didn’t do anything more embarrassing than sing bad karaoke too loudly. Clearly Lewis was something of a moderating influence on Tony, which was an interesting discovery. There was video of the two of them still singing “You Give Love A Bad Name” as Tony checked them into the swankiest hotel in Albuquerque (which actually was pretty swanky, despite being in New Mexico).
If Lewis hadn’t been morning moiety, Phil would have been very jealous.
When Tony had gone back to New York, he’d brought Lewis with him. And the two of them proceeded to be photographed in all the major tourist locations, usually doing things that—while they didn’t hurt anyone—eventually got them thrown out. On one particularly memorable occasion, they were escorted out of the Met after using Command Strips to hang beautifully framed children’s drawings, complete with little title plates, in the blank spaces on the walls. Apparently they’d spent some time getting kids under the age of five to contribute the art. Most of the drawings involved Iron Man in one way or another. (The museum took all the pictures down, but did not destroy them. Instead, they mailed them to Tony, who was now having them shipped to his various properties.)
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Pepper ranted to him one night, as she mixed a mimosa. “It’s like they’re a double act now! And, don’t get me wrong, I love that Darcy can apparently rein in his worst impulses. I don’t think he’s been drunk in public once in the past month.”
Phil nodded. “But she does indulge all of his not-necessarily-good impulses to their full extent.”
There was a long moment of quiet before Pepper finally said, “She is gorgeous, though.”
Phil did not reply to that. He was trying (unsuccessfully) not to notice. He wasn’t sure if Darcy really liked him.
Tony, being himself, gave Lewis full access to a jet so that she could fly back and forth from New Mexico and then sent her dozens of texts when she didn’t come up on weekends. Which is why Phil occasionally found her wandering through Tony’s penthouse at 10:30 AM.
In pajamas.
And, okay, so it was long pants and a tee-shirt, so it wasn’t like this was something out of some lurid romance novel where she always slept in slinky silks. But she was beautiful and young and interesting and funny and he was not made of stone.
He tried focusing on his bagels.
She was either oblivious to his awkwardness or didn’t care, because she sat down across from him. “Have you heard anything more from Thor?”
“No. Though, given the damage his visit did, that may be for the best,” Phil answered.
“He’s not a bad guy,” she pointed out.
“People don’t have to be bad to be dangerous,” Phil pointed out.
Darcy munched absently on a PopTart and did not disagree.
Unable to help himself, Phil said, “When did you know Thor was an alien?”
“Jane figured it out first. Erik dragged his feet. I went with Jane mostly ‘cause I thought it’d be cool if he was,” Darcy answered.
“‘Thought?’ You don’t think so any more?”
“No, I still do, but I’m also confused now. I mean, you noticed he’s morning, right?”
“And if he’s an alien, why does he have a moiety at all?” It was a good question. One he’d been struggling with, too.
“It’s driving me nuts,” Darcy agreed. “I’d be worried that the Asgardians had influenced how we marry, but the sedoretu predates recorded human history, so it’s from before they had contact with us.”
“Did we influence how they marry?”
“That would mean Thor had no moiety when he visited Earth two thousand years ago, and then became morning over the course of his lifetime, and that’s not how it works.”
Phil blinked. Darcy had obviously put a lot of thought into this.
After a moment, she shrugged. “Aliens are weird. Thor said he was coming back, so maybe I’ll get the chance to ask him. Maybe he’ll even bring some more people along, for comparison.”
“It might be nice to meet another Asgardian,” Phil agreed. He looked back at his bagels and didn’t say more. (Dork!)
Author’s Notes: I do not remember where I saw “Gimli” as a codename for Volstagg. It was another fanfic, and I remember enjoying it. If anyone does know off the top of their head, let me know so that I can link people.
DrudgeReport.com is a news aggregator website, and actually does love puns. A lot. If you weren’t reading their headlines during the Anthony Weiner/Carlos Danger thing, you missed out. I swear there was one that said “Weiner Remains Firm” linking to an article about him not dropping out of the election.
Chapter One - First Meetings
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Five - Balance
Chapter Six - Tesseract
Chapter Seven - Tahiti