bungakertas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bungakertas) wrote2014-01-29 12:44 pm
bungakertas) wrote2014-01-29 12:44 pm
Entry tags:
Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 5
Compatible Weirdness - Chapter 5
Disclaimer and general author's notes are in the first chapter, which is linked at the bottom.
*~*~*
Phil was on a mission in India when Pepper was mugged.
It was random. The guy didn’t even know who she was. He had no idea she was connected to Tony Stark or Stark Industries. He didn’t even actually hurt her, and everything he took was recovered in less than two hours. As bad news went, it could have been much worse.
But he’d pulled a knife on her, and she was very shaken up.
He didn’t want to admit it, but so was he. Pepper was his…family. He could handle it if he were the one on the line. He hated it every time Tony put on his suit, though. And now Pepper had actually been attacked by someone, and his heart did not stop racing until he saw her again and she was fine.
He was an agent. He knew how this went. The solution to this fear wasn’t to learn to live with it; it was to do something about it. To take the people you were afraid for and make them a team. Your team. He should’ve done this already, but, especially now, he wasn’t going to wait any longer.
The day after he got back, he dragged her, Tony, and Lewis down to a private outdoor range and coached them through hitting a man-sized target from fifteen feet. Nobody turned into a marksman overnight. Lewis struggled the most, though. She struggled through the second, third, and fourth trips as well. Finally, she turned to him and offered him the gun she was using.
“Look, how likely is it that I’ll ever need to use this anyway?”
“Not likely,” Phil replied. “How likely is it that you’ll meet a man out of Norse mythology?”
Darcy gave him a dirty look at that. “Not the point.”
“That’s exactly the point,” he countered. “Unlikely things happen. They may not happen often, but they do happen. They can happen to you. It’s much better that you have a gun, know how to use it, and never need to than that you need to and don’t know. I can’t be there for you all the time. Neither can Tony. If something ever happens, this way, you won’t need us to.”
Her shoulders slumped and she turned to look downrange again. “I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to hit that thing.”
Phil laid a hand on her shoulder. “There’s no time table. You aren’t going to fail a test if this doesn’t come easily to you.”
“I just…it feels so awkward. Like my fingers don’t belong to my hands or something.”
Phil smiled. “Face the target and take aim, but don’t fire.”
She did it.
“Now,” Phil said, “I’m going to stand behind you so that you can feel me as I fire. Is that all right?”
She nodded, looking at him oddly.
He took position right behind Darcy, slid his hands over hers and guided the gun to the target. The odd look vanished. Instead, there was a blush staining her cheeks. Interesting. Maybe she did like him after all.
“How does this help?” she asked.
“Just focus on the target,” he said. “Now breathe in…” He squeezed the trigger. A perfect bullseye.
He let go of her slowly, because he might not have been blushing, but it was definitely nice to be this close to her and see that she enjoyed it. “Now, try it on your own.”
Her next shot wasn’t a bullseye, but it was a lot closer than her previous efforts.
“Better,” he smiled. “Remember how that felt.”
She blinked at him. “Do you teach everyone how to shoot like that?”
“No.”
She improved by leaps and bounds. After a few weeks, she was the best shot of the three of his new students. Tony was the worst. It didn’t matter whether he was using handguns or rifles. There was a tiny part of Phil that was a little bit pleased by this, because finally they’d found something the supergenius wasn’t good at. But eventually even he progressed to the point where he could be termed competent.
It didn’t take away Phil’s fears, but now he didn’t have to worry (as much) if he wasn’t right there and Pepper was mugged again.
Darcy was just there, these days. All the time. And Phil wasn’t sure what to do with that. Not because he disliked her. He absolutely liked her. She made him laugh, and she sometimes just quietly sat next to him while she marked up a textbook and he went over phone records (or something else equally tedious). She and Pepper swapped their favorite films and make-up, and occasionally they could be found sleeping against each other on a couch with various work spread out in front of them. There was an odd distance, however, from him that he wasn’t sure what to do about. He didn’t think she was still upset about the iPod. Especially not after Tony had built her a custom mp3 player. But she just looked at him sometimes like she was waiting for something, and he didn’t know what she was waiting for.
It wasn’t until Tony pointed it out, though, that Phil realized what had happened.
“I didn’t believe people really did this,” Tony mused.
They were both on roller boards underneath Lola’s engine. Tony had finally convinced Phil to let him look at the car.
“Did what?” Phil asked, absently eyeing the fuel intake, even though he knew for a cold fact that there was nothing wrong with it.
“Squared up. I thought everyone eventually just picked names out of a hat when they got tired of waiting.”
Phil jerked so hard he smacked his head against something. Hard.
“Squared u—oh.” Because somehow, despite the fact that Darcy was a morning woman, and despite the fact that he and Pepper were well over half-way in love with her, and despite the fact that Tony had loved her on sight, Phil had somehow missed the fact where that was a whole quartet.
Tony threw a rag at his shoulder, callously ignoring the fact that Phil’s head was still throbbing. “You totally didn’t see it, didn’t you? Please tell me you’ve at least kissed her.”
Phil was silent.
“What the hell, Phil?” Tony demanded, waving a tool at him that Phil was fairly certain he had agreed not to use on the car. “She’s gorgeous, she’s hilarious, she’s smart… I know you like me, and she’s basically me with less staggering self-absorption. And boobs.” He tapped on something that Phil couldn’t see.
Phil absolutely did not say that he knew very well how Darcy was shaped. Instead he sighed. “Isn’t she awfully young, though?”
Tony gave him a very dark look and did not need to say out loud that he was practically Peter Pan and Darcy was more mature than him in at least ten different ways. Instead, he said “She’s twenty-seven. Yes, that’s younger than the rest of us, but she’s an adult. Just because she went to college late doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.” He poked Phil in the ribs with a little wrench. “Pepper’s been wondering why she seemed to skip half our dates. She thought it was me. I can’t wait to tell her it was actually you.”
Phil turned back to the fuel line.
Tony rolled his eyes. “Phil, this is me. How can I be telling you this? Darcy’s the newbie here. It’s our job to let her in.”
There was a long silence. “I’m an idiot,” Phil finally said.
“Well, now’s your big chance to go fix it, Agent Slowpoke.” Tony shoved him out from underneath Lola and made no move to follow.
Phil left Lola with Tony, knowing that she might well be flight capable by the time he came back. He at least had the presence of mind to wash the grease off his hands before seeking Darcy out and asking her to be there for the next date night.
She responded to this invitation by wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him soundly, her whole body pressed against his, heedless of the grease that was still clinging to his shirt or the sweat that was on his face. And since she obviously didn’t mind these things, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her back.
“I would love to,” Darcy said after pulling back a few moments later. And she didn’t look like she was waiting on anything now. She looked…happy. Phil kissed her again.
A quartet. They really were a quartet. This might actually work. And if he noticed her and Pepper making out over breakfast the next day, then that just made it better.
This was already the best year of his life and it was only March.
While he might have done it because he thought he was about to die, Tony was quick to realize that he had been on to something very good when he made Pepper CEO. She kept Stark in perfect order, and the company bounced back from Tony’s meltdown and the Hammer-oid attack that had nearly destroyed the Expo completely by the end of spring. Much to everyone’s shock, Pepper kept the Stark Expo open, though she complained about it frequently when Tony and Darcy weren’t there to hear it.
Darcy kept flying in on the weekends, laden with homework that only Pepper really understood. Phil had never claimed any understanding of politics, which is why he worked for law enforcement (sort of).
He had work. They still hadn’t gotten a lead on Spider-Man (which was weird, because they usually were able to get people identified pretty quickly). But SHIELD was producing some incredibly fun-looking model guns based on the Destroyer, as Jane had called the metal suit Thor defeated. The helicarrier was completed and Phil was finally able to move out of his office at the Pentagon.
Things went on like this through the end of summer. And when an enterprising photographer finally snapped a picture of the four of them on a date in Malibu (because when you were dating Tony Stark, that kind of thing happened), Phil found himself surprisingly uncaring. It had only been a matter of time anyway. The fact that Fury, Romanoff, and Hill all expressed surprise to him was just the icing on the cake. (More precisely in Fury’s case, the director expressed that he had known Coulson had been dating somebody, but had assumed it was somebody classier. Someone who could play cello, maybe.)
Pepper and Darcy wrote press releases and Tony was suddenly getting asked about his love life more than Iron Man in his occasional television interview. Apparently even Ellen Degeneres was not above a little prodding, though, true to her usual form, she was both funny and knew where to stop pushing. Comparatively speaking, Phil knew he had gotten off lightly even if it was going to be tough for him to do undercover work for a while.
A few months after the news had come out, Phil woke up to the smell of coffee, sausage, eggs, pancakes… He had spent that night in his room of Tony’s house, which was pretty normal these days. But, while all four of them were there, he knew for a cold fact that none of them cooked breakfast. Ever. Pepper was in to work early and ate a small breakfast. Darcy, despite being a morning woman, was not a “morning person” and could barely be relied on to know her own name before 9:30. And there was no guaranteeing whether Tony even remembered what food was at any point during the day. Phil was more than happy with bagels, most of the time.
He wandered into the kitchen to find Tony, barefoot and still in pajamas, cheerfully ordering JARVIS to produce every single breakfast food he had ever eaten or seen.
“What’s this?” Phil asked.
“Ah…Breakfast. Obviously.” Tony replied, a quick kiss taking any sting out of the sarcasm. Though he did seem distracted.
Pepper wandered in, with Darcy, half-walking and half-sleeping, propped up on her shoulder. Tony easily slid an arm around her and placed her on a stool around the island in the middle of the kitchen. Phil and Pepper dragged their own to either side of her, to make sure she didn’t slide off.
Tony began fixing plates for the four of them. All of Phil’s favorite breakfast foods (other than bagels). The plating left something to be desired, but the food was delicious. The smell of waffles with blueberry syrup began to pull Darcy from her morning delirium, as did the coffee that Tony set beside her plate. Fixed exactly how she liked it. Phil and Pepper received black coffee and hot tea respectively. And Tony sat down at the island with his own coffee and started eating.
Phil looked at his plate, over to Pepper—who looked equally baffled, and finally to Tony. There was no way he’d go to all this trouble just for breakfast. So Phil skewered him with a look. “What are we waiting for, then?”
Tony leveled his fork at Darcy. “Sleeping Beauty to shake off her nap.”
“’M up, r’nt I?” Darcy protested in a mumble, even though she was half-leaning against Phil.
Tony gave her an indulgent grin. “Don’t worry. There’s no rush. We can wait on you.”
Darcy gave him a bleary scowl, but Phil could see he meant exactly that. Whatever he had planned, he’d budgeted some time for Darcy to wake up into it.
So they ate their breakfasts, becoming more animated as she came alive. About mid-way through breakfast, when Darcy was groggy, but no longer half-dead, Tony opened a drawer on his side of the island and pulled out three small velvet-covered boxes, each a different color. He set a green one in front of Pepper, a blue one in front of Darcy, and a black one in front of Phil.
Darcy came awake in an instant.
“Tony?” Pepper said.
“Two mornings, two evenings, we all like each other, we’re all in the same place,” Tony shrugged. “I say we call it.”
Phil snorted at his somewhat underwhelming description of marriage, but this was Tony and underneath his casual manner was a desperate kind of look that hid just behind his smile. And maybe any other group of people wouldn’t have seen it, but this was them and Phil knew he wasn’t fooling anyone.
“You’re asking us to marry you?” Darcy said, apparently just as surprised as Phil that it was Tony who’d actually been the one to ask.
“I guess, for you, this might be a little fast,” Tony answered, smiling at Darcy. “But I can’t imagine asking anyone else. Ever. The three of you are the only people in the world who make sense.” He paused. “I suppose things didn’t work out well for my parents, but…if I’m ever going to try marrying anybody, I want it to be the three of you.”
Phil blinked. Well, if he was going to put it that way. “Yes.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Darcy agreed.
They all looked to Pepper.
“What? As if I would say no,” she laughed.
“Oh good. That means I can wear my ring,” Tony grinned, fishing a fourth one, without a box, out of the drawer.
The engagement rings Tony got them were refreshingly tasteful. He’d assigned each person a colored gemstone and set three onto each ring. Rubies for himself, emeralds for Darcy, yellow beryl for Phil, and sapphires for Pepper. Phil’s ring was a simple, round band with an emerald, a ruby, and a sapphire spaced equally around it. It would be joined by the flat band when they married.
When. That was a nice thought. Darcy took the ring from his hand and slid it onto his finger. Then she smiled at him. More broadly than he’d ever seen her smile. There was a long quiet moment where they all just soaked in the revelation. “So this is us,” Darcy finally said.
“This is us,” Pepper agreed.
And they did make sense. Tony was just the first to see it. They had all made these spaces for each other and it just worked. It wasn’t just the way Tony kissed Pepper and him absently as he disappeared into his lab, or the way that Darcy preferred to sit beside him or Pepper when she was working on yet another essay, even if they weren’t helping. It was also the way he got phone calls from Pepper late at night when he was trying to untangle a case and she was bogged down at the office and they could talk while they worked. It was the way Tony was increasingly sober as he and Darcy texted photos from all over the world. It was the way that all of them drew inspiration from the other three. It wasn’t just the four of them together, or even each of them individually. It was how they each blended with each other, in so many ways. In so many marriages, people never clicked like this. Not all these ways. Phil could not imagine anyone else to spend his life with but these three people.
There was another moment and then Tony said, “Whatever. I wasn’t trying to be this romantic.” But he had a soft smile as he said it.
The news was actually fairly low-key about everything. Phil was absolutely ruined for undercover work from now on, but he was not recognized on the street. Only a few people at SHIELD even bothered to congratulate him when they saw his ring, but no one asked about who he was marrying. As it turned out, while the public was interested in Tony, they were mainly interested in him. The fact that he was getting married was news. Who he was getting married to was mostly not. Phil and Darcy were very quietly rejoicing at the bullet they’d dodged.
They decided on a fairly small ceremony, with pictures released to be released afterwards. Aside from dodging press, this also minimized the chance of their wedding being invaded by Doom-bots or something. They pulled it together pretty quickly, thanks to Tony Stark’s fabulous riches. And thankfully, the ceremony went off without a single sign of trouble.
They spent their honeymoon in Bali, drinking fruity things he didn’t bother to remember the names of, and learning how to fit together. It was two days before any of them bothered to leave the hotel, instead of just bouncing from bed to bed. He had married the best people in the world.
*~*~*
Author’s Notes: Yes, I have been to a shooting range before, and no, that was not how I learned to shoot (at all). I am sacrificing realism for the sexy.
Phil’s “make them part of your team,” on the other hand, is not made up. It comes from a book called On Combat by Dave Grossman. In it, he advises people to do exactly that with family members for exactly this reason. Bad people exist and you can find yourself having to deal with one of them. It’s best to have contingencies and never need them than to have something come up and have no plan. And it’s best if you include the people you care about in those plans so that if something ever does happen, you don’t find yourself having to stop and explain what’s going to happen because they already know the plan. There are several examples as to why this is true and how it’s been successfully employed in the book.
From what little we know about the cellist, I actually like her so far. (Okay, "plays cello" and "loves Phil Coulson" is hardly a complete character dossier, but we at least know she has good taste.) So I couldn't resist the name drop.
Yay! They got hitched! But, that is not the end of the story.
Chapter One - First Meetings
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Four - Darcy
Chapter Six - Tesseract
Chapter Seven - Tahiti
Disclaimer and general author's notes are in the first chapter, which is linked at the bottom.
Phil was on a mission in India when Pepper was mugged.
It was random. The guy didn’t even know who she was. He had no idea she was connected to Tony Stark or Stark Industries. He didn’t even actually hurt her, and everything he took was recovered in less than two hours. As bad news went, it could have been much worse.
But he’d pulled a knife on her, and she was very shaken up.
He didn’t want to admit it, but so was he. Pepper was his…family. He could handle it if he were the one on the line. He hated it every time Tony put on his suit, though. And now Pepper had actually been attacked by someone, and his heart did not stop racing until he saw her again and she was fine.
He was an agent. He knew how this went. The solution to this fear wasn’t to learn to live with it; it was to do something about it. To take the people you were afraid for and make them a team. Your team. He should’ve done this already, but, especially now, he wasn’t going to wait any longer.
The day after he got back, he dragged her, Tony, and Lewis down to a private outdoor range and coached them through hitting a man-sized target from fifteen feet. Nobody turned into a marksman overnight. Lewis struggled the most, though. She struggled through the second, third, and fourth trips as well. Finally, she turned to him and offered him the gun she was using.
“Look, how likely is it that I’ll ever need to use this anyway?”
“Not likely,” Phil replied. “How likely is it that you’ll meet a man out of Norse mythology?”
Darcy gave him a dirty look at that. “Not the point.”
“That’s exactly the point,” he countered. “Unlikely things happen. They may not happen often, but they do happen. They can happen to you. It’s much better that you have a gun, know how to use it, and never need to than that you need to and don’t know. I can’t be there for you all the time. Neither can Tony. If something ever happens, this way, you won’t need us to.”
Her shoulders slumped and she turned to look downrange again. “I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to hit that thing.”
Phil laid a hand on her shoulder. “There’s no time table. You aren’t going to fail a test if this doesn’t come easily to you.”
“I just…it feels so awkward. Like my fingers don’t belong to my hands or something.”
Phil smiled. “Face the target and take aim, but don’t fire.”
She did it.
“Now,” Phil said, “I’m going to stand behind you so that you can feel me as I fire. Is that all right?”
She nodded, looking at him oddly.
He took position right behind Darcy, slid his hands over hers and guided the gun to the target. The odd look vanished. Instead, there was a blush staining her cheeks. Interesting. Maybe she did like him after all.
“How does this help?” she asked.
“Just focus on the target,” he said. “Now breathe in…” He squeezed the trigger. A perfect bullseye.
He let go of her slowly, because he might not have been blushing, but it was definitely nice to be this close to her and see that she enjoyed it. “Now, try it on your own.”
Her next shot wasn’t a bullseye, but it was a lot closer than her previous efforts.
“Better,” he smiled. “Remember how that felt.”
She blinked at him. “Do you teach everyone how to shoot like that?”
“No.”
She improved by leaps and bounds. After a few weeks, she was the best shot of the three of his new students. Tony was the worst. It didn’t matter whether he was using handguns or rifles. There was a tiny part of Phil that was a little bit pleased by this, because finally they’d found something the supergenius wasn’t good at. But eventually even he progressed to the point where he could be termed competent.
It didn’t take away Phil’s fears, but now he didn’t have to worry (as much) if he wasn’t right there and Pepper was mugged again.
Darcy was just there, these days. All the time. And Phil wasn’t sure what to do with that. Not because he disliked her. He absolutely liked her. She made him laugh, and she sometimes just quietly sat next to him while she marked up a textbook and he went over phone records (or something else equally tedious). She and Pepper swapped their favorite films and make-up, and occasionally they could be found sleeping against each other on a couch with various work spread out in front of them. There was an odd distance, however, from him that he wasn’t sure what to do about. He didn’t think she was still upset about the iPod. Especially not after Tony had built her a custom mp3 player. But she just looked at him sometimes like she was waiting for something, and he didn’t know what she was waiting for.
It wasn’t until Tony pointed it out, though, that Phil realized what had happened.
“I didn’t believe people really did this,” Tony mused.
They were both on roller boards underneath Lola’s engine. Tony had finally convinced Phil to let him look at the car.
“Did what?” Phil asked, absently eyeing the fuel intake, even though he knew for a cold fact that there was nothing wrong with it.
“Squared up. I thought everyone eventually just picked names out of a hat when they got tired of waiting.”
Phil jerked so hard he smacked his head against something. Hard.
“Squared u—oh.” Because somehow, despite the fact that Darcy was a morning woman, and despite the fact that he and Pepper were well over half-way in love with her, and despite the fact that Tony had loved her on sight, Phil had somehow missed the fact where that was a whole quartet.
Tony threw a rag at his shoulder, callously ignoring the fact that Phil’s head was still throbbing. “You totally didn’t see it, didn’t you? Please tell me you’ve at least kissed her.”
Phil was silent.
“What the hell, Phil?” Tony demanded, waving a tool at him that Phil was fairly certain he had agreed not to use on the car. “She’s gorgeous, she’s hilarious, she’s smart… I know you like me, and she’s basically me with less staggering self-absorption. And boobs.” He tapped on something that Phil couldn’t see.
Phil absolutely did not say that he knew very well how Darcy was shaped. Instead he sighed. “Isn’t she awfully young, though?”
Tony gave him a very dark look and did not need to say out loud that he was practically Peter Pan and Darcy was more mature than him in at least ten different ways. Instead, he said “She’s twenty-seven. Yes, that’s younger than the rest of us, but she’s an adult. Just because she went to college late doesn’t mean it doesn’t count.” He poked Phil in the ribs with a little wrench. “Pepper’s been wondering why she seemed to skip half our dates. She thought it was me. I can’t wait to tell her it was actually you.”
Phil turned back to the fuel line.
Tony rolled his eyes. “Phil, this is me. How can I be telling you this? Darcy’s the newbie here. It’s our job to let her in.”
There was a long silence. “I’m an idiot,” Phil finally said.
“Well, now’s your big chance to go fix it, Agent Slowpoke.” Tony shoved him out from underneath Lola and made no move to follow.
Phil left Lola with Tony, knowing that she might well be flight capable by the time he came back. He at least had the presence of mind to wash the grease off his hands before seeking Darcy out and asking her to be there for the next date night.
She responded to this invitation by wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him soundly, her whole body pressed against his, heedless of the grease that was still clinging to his shirt or the sweat that was on his face. And since she obviously didn’t mind these things, he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her back.
“I would love to,” Darcy said after pulling back a few moments later. And she didn’t look like she was waiting on anything now. She looked…happy. Phil kissed her again.
A quartet. They really were a quartet. This might actually work. And if he noticed her and Pepper making out over breakfast the next day, then that just made it better.
This was already the best year of his life and it was only March.
While he might have done it because he thought he was about to die, Tony was quick to realize that he had been on to something very good when he made Pepper CEO. She kept Stark in perfect order, and the company bounced back from Tony’s meltdown and the Hammer-oid attack that had nearly destroyed the Expo completely by the end of spring. Much to everyone’s shock, Pepper kept the Stark Expo open, though she complained about it frequently when Tony and Darcy weren’t there to hear it.
Darcy kept flying in on the weekends, laden with homework that only Pepper really understood. Phil had never claimed any understanding of politics, which is why he worked for law enforcement (sort of).
He had work. They still hadn’t gotten a lead on Spider-Man (which was weird, because they usually were able to get people identified pretty quickly). But SHIELD was producing some incredibly fun-looking model guns based on the Destroyer, as Jane had called the metal suit Thor defeated. The helicarrier was completed and Phil was finally able to move out of his office at the Pentagon.
Things went on like this through the end of summer. And when an enterprising photographer finally snapped a picture of the four of them on a date in Malibu (because when you were dating Tony Stark, that kind of thing happened), Phil found himself surprisingly uncaring. It had only been a matter of time anyway. The fact that Fury, Romanoff, and Hill all expressed surprise to him was just the icing on the cake. (More precisely in Fury’s case, the director expressed that he had known Coulson had been dating somebody, but had assumed it was somebody classier. Someone who could play cello, maybe.)
Pepper and Darcy wrote press releases and Tony was suddenly getting asked about his love life more than Iron Man in his occasional television interview. Apparently even Ellen Degeneres was not above a little prodding, though, true to her usual form, she was both funny and knew where to stop pushing. Comparatively speaking, Phil knew he had gotten off lightly even if it was going to be tough for him to do undercover work for a while.
A few months after the news had come out, Phil woke up to the smell of coffee, sausage, eggs, pancakes… He had spent that night in his room of Tony’s house, which was pretty normal these days. But, while all four of them were there, he knew for a cold fact that none of them cooked breakfast. Ever. Pepper was in to work early and ate a small breakfast. Darcy, despite being a morning woman, was not a “morning person” and could barely be relied on to know her own name before 9:30. And there was no guaranteeing whether Tony even remembered what food was at any point during the day. Phil was more than happy with bagels, most of the time.
He wandered into the kitchen to find Tony, barefoot and still in pajamas, cheerfully ordering JARVIS to produce every single breakfast food he had ever eaten or seen.
“What’s this?” Phil asked.
“Ah…Breakfast. Obviously.” Tony replied, a quick kiss taking any sting out of the sarcasm. Though he did seem distracted.
Pepper wandered in, with Darcy, half-walking and half-sleeping, propped up on her shoulder. Tony easily slid an arm around her and placed her on a stool around the island in the middle of the kitchen. Phil and Pepper dragged their own to either side of her, to make sure she didn’t slide off.
Tony began fixing plates for the four of them. All of Phil’s favorite breakfast foods (other than bagels). The plating left something to be desired, but the food was delicious. The smell of waffles with blueberry syrup began to pull Darcy from her morning delirium, as did the coffee that Tony set beside her plate. Fixed exactly how she liked it. Phil and Pepper received black coffee and hot tea respectively. And Tony sat down at the island with his own coffee and started eating.
Phil looked at his plate, over to Pepper—who looked equally baffled, and finally to Tony. There was no way he’d go to all this trouble just for breakfast. So Phil skewered him with a look. “What are we waiting for, then?”
Tony leveled his fork at Darcy. “Sleeping Beauty to shake off her nap.”
“’M up, r’nt I?” Darcy protested in a mumble, even though she was half-leaning against Phil.
Tony gave her an indulgent grin. “Don’t worry. There’s no rush. We can wait on you.”
Darcy gave him a bleary scowl, but Phil could see he meant exactly that. Whatever he had planned, he’d budgeted some time for Darcy to wake up into it.
So they ate their breakfasts, becoming more animated as she came alive. About mid-way through breakfast, when Darcy was groggy, but no longer half-dead, Tony opened a drawer on his side of the island and pulled out three small velvet-covered boxes, each a different color. He set a green one in front of Pepper, a blue one in front of Darcy, and a black one in front of Phil.
Darcy came awake in an instant.
“Tony?” Pepper said.
“Two mornings, two evenings, we all like each other, we’re all in the same place,” Tony shrugged. “I say we call it.”
Phil snorted at his somewhat underwhelming description of marriage, but this was Tony and underneath his casual manner was a desperate kind of look that hid just behind his smile. And maybe any other group of people wouldn’t have seen it, but this was them and Phil knew he wasn’t fooling anyone.
“You’re asking us to marry you?” Darcy said, apparently just as surprised as Phil that it was Tony who’d actually been the one to ask.
“I guess, for you, this might be a little fast,” Tony answered, smiling at Darcy. “But I can’t imagine asking anyone else. Ever. The three of you are the only people in the world who make sense.” He paused. “I suppose things didn’t work out well for my parents, but…if I’m ever going to try marrying anybody, I want it to be the three of you.”
Phil blinked. Well, if he was going to put it that way. “Yes.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Darcy agreed.
They all looked to Pepper.
“What? As if I would say no,” she laughed.
“Oh good. That means I can wear my ring,” Tony grinned, fishing a fourth one, without a box, out of the drawer.
The engagement rings Tony got them were refreshingly tasteful. He’d assigned each person a colored gemstone and set three onto each ring. Rubies for himself, emeralds for Darcy, yellow beryl for Phil, and sapphires for Pepper. Phil’s ring was a simple, round band with an emerald, a ruby, and a sapphire spaced equally around it. It would be joined by the flat band when they married.
When. That was a nice thought. Darcy took the ring from his hand and slid it onto his finger. Then she smiled at him. More broadly than he’d ever seen her smile. There was a long quiet moment where they all just soaked in the revelation. “So this is us,” Darcy finally said.
“This is us,” Pepper agreed.
And they did make sense. Tony was just the first to see it. They had all made these spaces for each other and it just worked. It wasn’t just the way Tony kissed Pepper and him absently as he disappeared into his lab, or the way that Darcy preferred to sit beside him or Pepper when she was working on yet another essay, even if they weren’t helping. It was also the way he got phone calls from Pepper late at night when he was trying to untangle a case and she was bogged down at the office and they could talk while they worked. It was the way Tony was increasingly sober as he and Darcy texted photos from all over the world. It was the way that all of them drew inspiration from the other three. It wasn’t just the four of them together, or even each of them individually. It was how they each blended with each other, in so many ways. In so many marriages, people never clicked like this. Not all these ways. Phil could not imagine anyone else to spend his life with but these three people.
There was another moment and then Tony said, “Whatever. I wasn’t trying to be this romantic.” But he had a soft smile as he said it.
The news was actually fairly low-key about everything. Phil was absolutely ruined for undercover work from now on, but he was not recognized on the street. Only a few people at SHIELD even bothered to congratulate him when they saw his ring, but no one asked about who he was marrying. As it turned out, while the public was interested in Tony, they were mainly interested in him. The fact that he was getting married was news. Who he was getting married to was mostly not. Phil and Darcy were very quietly rejoicing at the bullet they’d dodged.
They decided on a fairly small ceremony, with pictures released to be released afterwards. Aside from dodging press, this also minimized the chance of their wedding being invaded by Doom-bots or something. They pulled it together pretty quickly, thanks to Tony Stark’s fabulous riches. And thankfully, the ceremony went off without a single sign of trouble.
They spent their honeymoon in Bali, drinking fruity things he didn’t bother to remember the names of, and learning how to fit together. It was two days before any of them bothered to leave the hotel, instead of just bouncing from bed to bed. He had married the best people in the world.
Author’s Notes: Yes, I have been to a shooting range before, and no, that was not how I learned to shoot (at all). I am sacrificing realism for the sexy.
Phil’s “make them part of your team,” on the other hand, is not made up. It comes from a book called On Combat by Dave Grossman. In it, he advises people to do exactly that with family members for exactly this reason. Bad people exist and you can find yourself having to deal with one of them. It’s best to have contingencies and never need them than to have something come up and have no plan. And it’s best if you include the people you care about in those plans so that if something ever does happen, you don’t find yourself having to stop and explain what’s going to happen because they already know the plan. There are several examples as to why this is true and how it’s been successfully employed in the book.
From what little we know about the cellist, I actually like her so far. (Okay, "plays cello" and "loves Phil Coulson" is hardly a complete character dossier, but we at least know she has good taste.) So I couldn't resist the name drop.
Yay! They got hitched! But, that is not the end of the story.
Chapter One - First Meetings
Chapter Two - Three
Chapter Three - Falling
Chapter Four - Darcy
Chapter Six - Tesseract
Chapter Seven - Tahiti