Chapter Text
“Nuh-uh. Nope. Nyet. Nein. Nada. Not gonna happen.”
“For fuck’s sake, Stark-”
“No. Nothin’ doin’. You cannot make me.”
“You sure about that?”
“I am immune to your dubious charms, Barton, fuck back off to the circus you rode in on.”
“You’re being a child, Stark.”
“Bite me, Romanoff. No, literally. You can bite me anywhere, anytime.”
“You would not enjoy that.”
“I’m willing to take that bet.”
“Your funeral.”
“I still think-”
“Oh fuck you, Banner. You are my Science! bro and I love you like the brother I never wanted, but I am not accepting Stucky as a ship name. That is stupid and dumb and frankly I’m insulted that it was even brought up for consideration. By you. Really, this is a betrayal of our deep and profound bromance and I am going to break up with you for it. I swear to Newton I will make Foster my new Science! bro, I am not even lying right now.”
“Charmed, I’m sure.”
“My god, she speaks! She’s aware of a world outside The Astronomical Journal- ow! Foster! Purple nurples are unnecessary and beneath you. Kinky though, did not know you were into BDSM. Thor is a lucky man.”
“Aye, that I am.”
“It was entirely necessary, and I’ll thank you to stop imagining my sex life because you’re not doing it justice. Also, give in to the Stucky.”
“No!”
“Tony, it’s a portmanteau, you’re supposed to-”
“Does it look like I care? No, really Brucie baby, look at my face. Is this the absurdly handsome face of someone who’s willing to put up with that bullshit?”
Not for the first time, Darcy Lewis wondered how in the hell this was her life now.
To be fair, she rushed to console herself, none of this was her fault. She hadn’t even known these clowns when all this nonsense got started.
She had been perfectly happy and innocent… well okay not innocent, but still… She had been minding her own business, bartending at The Tower to help pay her way through Culver University’s Political Science combined Master’s/Ph.D. program. The Tower was objectively the best of the three bars in the college town of Kirby. Baxter’s was the loud, shiny club where all the frat bros congregated, smelling up the place with their Axe cologne and general douchebaggery. Meanwhile, Xavier’s was a hot mess of constant staff turnover and wild shifts in theme nights [plus, they had that whole issue with Genosha, the trendy new restaurant next door, trying to steal all their customers]. The Tower, by contrast, had a steady group of regulars who didn’t start bar fights most of the time, and where everyone just wanted to hang out and do their own thing. Darcy wasn’t required to wear lingerie or swimsuits, or flirt with customers to pour drinks, which she appreciated, and when things got slow her adorable little old man of a manager, Stan, didn’t mind her pulling out her textbooks. Encouraged it, actually; he liked to say with a fond smile that he couldn’t afford the kind of trouble Darcy would attract if she got bored.
And that. That right there, Darcy considered, was how she’d gotten drawn into this insanity with those idiots in the corner booth.
They’d been coming to The Tower for the last few years. It had started, as most things somehow did, with Tony, who had [God knows how] gotten the idea that this was a coffee shop and been very angry when he was told he was mistaken, but who had legit squealed when he realized he could get his hands on decent scotch, and had been a fixture ever since. He’d started dragging his entourage here, first in ones and twos, until somehow there was a whole crowd of them swinging by several times a week. The cast varied every time, but by now Darcy was familiar enough with the rotating regulars that she could predict who would be in as well as where the missing members of the merry band were on any given night.
Come to think of it, she should probably be concerned about the state of their livers. She wouldn’t, of course, because for all his many faults Tony was a fantastic tipper and she’d like to remain employed, but still. Even for post-grad students, it was somewhat worrying how much inventory they could go through in a night.
Jesus, she was going Mom Mode Activated on her best clients. Get your shit together, Lewis.
Anyways. For a while they had just been clients, and Darcy had just served them their drinks and their buffalo wings like everybody else. But when you’re around a group of people this often, and they’re all such snarky assholes… She’d gotten invested, alright? These people were legitimately coocoo banana pancakes, but somehow she’d gotten to know all about [among other oddities] Tony’s semi-frequent robotics disasters and scientifically impossible ability to make anything catch on fire, and Clint’s utter inability to make it through a day without at least two minor injuries, and Jane’s struggles against the absolute patriarchal academic bullshit going down in the astrophysics department…
“Fuck you all, Stucky sounds like something an annoying kindergartener says.”
“So perfect for you, then?”
“Piss off, Romanoff. I am at least as annoying as a seven-year-old.”
“Point.”
…and the ongoing, all-consuming drama of the How the Hell is This Pairing Still Unnamed We’ve Been Arguing About This for Months Now saga.
“I thought you people settled on WinterShield,” Darcy commented.
She sashayed over to them, easily balancing the heavy tray full of their usual drink orders. She smiled up [and up and up] at Thor as he leapt out of his seat, stretching out to help her balance the tray while Nat and Sam cleared away the last round of empty baskets and pitchers.
“No, Minion, you settled on WinterShield,” Tony refuted.
“What have we discussed about calling me Minion?” Darcy asked with a [mostly joking] sneer.
“You said something or other that I didn’t pay attention to,” Tony said airily, waving a dismissive hand. “And I still maintain that WinterShield is a stupid name. Though not as stupid as fucking Stucky,” he sneered, spitting out the portmanteau like the dirtiest of curses.
“WinterShield is still my vote,” Thor nodded, double-fisting new, overflowing baskets of hot wings [Darcy couldn’t be blamed for taking a moment to enjoy the view. Rugby was doing Thor’s biceps – and Darcy’s libido – damn good, oh yes it was]. “Tis poetic, think you not?”
“Yeah, and that’s the problem,” Sam scoffed, grabbing the beer pitcher before Clint could drink from it. “It’s too classy for those idiots.”
“Pretty sure James’ Kahn scholarship argues against being classless,” Nat replied in defense of her adopted brother, the barest trace of pride in her dry delivery. “Poetry is pretty classy. Steve, though. Steve I will concede.”
“Psht, Steve doesn’t need class,” Darcy refuted, propping a hip against the side of the banquet seating. “Not as long as he keeps wearing those tiny, tiny shirts. He puts my rack to shame and I’m not even mad about it.”
“Don’t be drawn in by the shirts, Darcy-girl,” Clint advised. “Your heart will be broken by his obliviousness, you know this.”
“Too late for me,” Darcy said cheerfully. “I am in. I am so fully in, and I do not understand how. I thought I leaned on the girl side of bi, but here I am. I blame Tasha.”
“I accept this,” Nat said with a regal nod.
“As you should,” Darcy nodded, carefully telegraphing the movement before patting Natasha’s shoulder. “Where are the lovebirds, speaking of? I haven’t seen them in like two weeks, what the hell.”
“James picked up a night shift in the tutoring lab,” Natasha replied.
“Three hours to write another dozen love poems to Steve’s abs,” Tony smirked, raising his scotch in a lazy toast.
“You will not steal his notebooks again,” Natasha stated mildly, pinning Tony down with a cool gaze as she delicately fingered the steak knife buried in half of her burger.
“Party pooper,” he muttered, but wisely shut up as Natasha narrowed her eyes at him.
“And Steve took over Pepper’s gallery shift so she could go out to California for a few days,” Sam reported, quickly moving the conversation along. “Her sister’s adoption finally went through, she went to help babysit the older one while Georgia and Caroline get the munchkin settled in.”
“Oh hell yeah,” Darcy grinned, bouncing in place as she clapped her hands. “I’ll have to text her to say mazel tov. I bet Sasha’s bouncing off the walls. New siblings are the best. So pure. So ripe for the spoiling.”
“Are you sure we’re not related?” Tony asked, cocking his head to the side as the rest of the table snickered.
“Are you doubting Helen’s Science!, Stark?” Darcy asked, raising an eyebrow. “We had her run the DNA test three times, just to be sure. Besides, don’t you think if I was Howard’s love baby that I’d have spent all his hush money to cover my student loans and wouldn’t be slumming it here?”
“Oh, don’t even pretend, Lewis. You love it here. You called us your baby ducklings and said you’d never be able to graduate until we all went with you because you couldn’t trust us to survive on our own,” Jane commented, glancing up from her scientific journal to grace Darcy with a beaming smile.
“Foster, stop dropping hints that I might have a heart,” Darcy chided her best friend as she set a special order of spicy fries liberally coated in honey in front of her. “Put down the journal and eat.”
“But-” Jane protested.
“Nope,” Darcy said unrepentantly, plucking the journal out of Jane’s hands and pointing firmly to the fries. “Eat now. Eviscerate Collins for his inaccuracies and plagiarism later.”
Jane pouted, but gave in with bad grace, her frown smoothing out as she shoveled the first mouthful of fries into her mouth. Thor smiled at Darcy in thanks, draping a heavily muscled arm around his pint-sized girlfriend’s shoulders.
“For serious though, why is this even still an argument?” Darcy asked, quickly glancing over her shoulder to make sure none of the other half-dozen customers scattered throughout the Tower needed any refills or attention. “Haven’t they been together for, like, ever?”
“Three years is not forever,” Sam scoffed. “However much it feels like it.”
“That’s only how long they’ve been married though,” Darcy refuted. “Then add all that time together in the Army, and school before that-”
“You can’t count school, they weren’t together then. Just pining,” Clint countered. “Army doesn’t count either, they were just-”
“Mrs. Rogers and Captain Barnes, from what Monty’s told me. One mind in two bodies, Mom’ing and Dad’ing the whole unit,” Darcy cut him off.
“When did you and Monty start talking?” Sam asked, rolling his eyes at Darcy’s wicked smirk. “Why did I even ask.”
“Because you can’t help but watch my sexual car crashes,” she replied, patting Sam’s cheek while returning Tony’s fist bump.
Sam shook his head, redirecting the conversation back to his futile argument. “Still not official.”
Darcy, Nat, Thor, and Tony all scoffed, and even Bruce shook his head.
“They were totally together, even if it wasn’t official,” Darcy stated. “I didn’t even know you clowns then, and even I know this.”
“I agree with my birdy bro. Nothing’s official till it’s Facebook official,” Clint said promptly, before frowning down at his plate. “Aw, burger, no.”
Natasha didn’t even pause from devouring her onion rings as she removed her knife from her burger and pinned it through Clint’s, saving the onions and mushrooms from sliding off into the glop of hot sauce Clint was dragging his fries through. He gave her a dopey grin and blew her an air kiss before stealing a piece of Sam’s pizza while Sam reached for the hot wings.
“They have been together for, like, ever,” Tony nodded, doing an eerily good imitation of Darcy’s inflection. “And that is why they need a fucking ship name already. Institutions need ship names.”
“How about ‘In It for the FAFSA’?” Natasha supplied.
Sam cackled. “’FAFSA was a Convenient Excuse’ is more like it,” he replied, grinning as he bumped fists with a faintly smiling Nat.
“Really? They seriously got married for the FAFSA?” Darcy asked, interest piqued. “Why have you people been holding out the good stories on me, I thought you loved me.”
“Go get yourself a beer, it’s a good one,” Clint grinned. “I’ll even clear you space on the table so you can headtable good and proper.”
“You’re so good to me,” Darcy smiled, bouncing over to the bar and happily pulling herself a draft of Sam Adams before rejoining her people and sliding in next to Natasha. “Spill.”
Sam beamed, his devastating gap-toothed grin on full display. “Well, it started like this…”