Chapter Four: 'World War III Happens On Schedule Because of Lack of Adequate Pocket Space.'

Darcy suddenly found herself busy with a lot of unexpected administrative duties for Jane. Apparently, the folks at SHIELD had finally realized that her filing system was indecipherable to anyone other than herself and her boss, and so Darcy spent about eight hours hanging out in the lab with Jane working out the best way to explain it. She hadn't actually expected to succeed so quickly, but when Clint dropped by (and that really meant dropped, given that he didn't use the door) to ask her if she had any intention of baking that day, Darcy recruited him to be her lab rat.

"If you tell anyone about this, I will leave you in an abandoned steam tunnel," was Clint's response when Darcy asked him to read her instructions and then file something for her.

"Even if you succeed? I mean, this is resumé material, here," Darcy laughed. She laughed harder as she watched his face scroll through various expressions as he read her three pages of instructions.

"This…" he started to say about halfway through, his mouth hanging open and starting various words without sound for the rest of his reading time. "Really?" he finally said, looking up at her. Darcy grinned at him with all her powers of vindictive joy. Clint pointed to the pages he'd just read in disgust. "The worst part is, I think I understand this nonsense. I feel violated."

Wordlessly, Darcy held out the folder to be filed.

Equally wordlessly, Clint took it from her, looked at it for a few seconds, including flipping through the pages inside. His eyes narrowed, and then he walked over to the correct cabinet, scanned the labels on the drawers, slid out the right one, and placed the folder in its proper place.

Jane and Darcy clapped.

"I suppose I should be grateful you're not living an alternate life as a sadistic high school teacher. I've heard people complain about all the hoops they had to jump through writing papers, measuring the margins with a ruler, or some shit," Clint said, shaking his head. "I suppose simple alphabetization was too simple?"

"You're angling for cookies," Jane said bluntly. Immediately, Clint's demeanor changed from angry disgust to suave amusement.

"Well, yeah," he said, spreading his arms out wide at his sides as if to say 'what did you expect?!'

Darcy hugged her arms to herself and smiled the smile of someone who felt like she truly belonged.

oOoOoOo

In the Avengers Tower, the idea of what was 'normal' was completely relative. Darcy had realized this for herself in what she'd started calling 'microshocks' within two days of moving in. Walking into a room to find it full of superheroes in casual clothing? Microshock. First name basis with Iron Man? Microshock. Today, though, today there was a big shock.

Darcy woke up and made her morning coffee in the kitchen of the suite she shared with Jane. She walked over to look out of the window at the amazing view of the city as normal, but that view had a surprise: there was a massive crane setting up in a parking area beside the tower. It was the kind of crane that she'd seen before, built for both speed and lifting power. That made an Avengers Tower kind of sense (the kind that you suspended your disbelief for), because while Darcy wouldn't rule out another twenty floors being built on the tower just on a whim, this didn't look like construction. This looked like extraction or repair.

She poured her coffee into one of her Starbucks travel mugs, crammed the lid on, and left her apartment to see if anyone else had seen the commotion. At the common room windows were Steve and Natasha; Nat turned to see her approach almost the second she was visible, and Darcy lifted her mug in a silent salute. The brief, warm smile she got in return felt like its own kind of victory, but Darcy didn't expect any kind of similar response from Steve. His body language changed when Darcy walked over to stand beside Natasha. His stance became wider, he crossed his arms over his chest, and while he didn't acknowledge Darcy, he did answer her unasked question.

"I asked JARVIS about it. Says there's something in one of the labs that needs to be transported, and this is the only way. Whatever it is can't be disassembled."

Darcy felt an irrational urge to search her body for those words, as if the fanfiction she'd come across once with the premise of First Words engraved on a soulmate's body was suddenly the best explanation of why Steve Rogers had avoided speaking to her for so long. She shook her head in a awful shiver to refute the idea, and when she turned to look at Natasha, Darcy saw a look of concern.

"Felt like someone just walked over my grave, I guess. That's what my Gran used to say about those kinds of shivers. It's nothing," Darcy said. Beside them, Steve huffed out a skeptical breath and turned to leave.

"Okay, I give up. What is it? What did I do?" Darcy burst out, crossing her arms in front of her angrily, all thoughts of impossible soulmates forgotten.

"I'm sorry?" Steve said in a voice that decidedly was not.

"You know about body language, don't give me that. I'm persona non grata with you, and I want to know why," Darcy bit out. "You're basically the embodiment of all that is good, honest, and just. I'm starting to feel like a villain just by virtue of being on the outs with you, Captain Rogers."

Steve shut his eyes on hearing that, and Darcy wondered which it was-disgust or dismay. When he opened them again, the look in them was unexpectedly sincere.

"I apologize for making you feel unwelcome. It's not you, not really," he said in a rigidly formal tone. "My memories are… hard work, sometimes. 'Then' and 'now' sometimes get mixed up. I'll work on it," he said, sighing. Steve scrubbed a hand through his hair, shot Natasha a nod, then power walked away from the two of them. The ding of the elevator told them where and how he went, but not why.

"That was impressive, actually," Nat said after a full minute of stunned silence. "He didn't give away anything about what his problem is, but that whole thing sure gave the impression that he did."

"Yeah I feel like if I brought it up again I'd look like I was harping," Darcy said. "What the actual fuck?"

oOoOoOo

Darcy had every intention of talking to Tony about Steve, but she didn't get a chance to speak to him until she walked into the SCAB lab to find it almost completely empty.

"You didn't think this was something you should maybe tell me about?" Darcy said in an admittedly petulant tone of voice as she walked over to look at the raised platform where the NTM had been sitting three days ago. "At least now I know what the crane was here for."

"Sorry, sorry," Tony said, wincing and holding his hands out in front of him apologetically.

Darcy whipped her phone out and quickly flipped it to video mode. "One more time, please?"

"No way," Tony said, grinning and putting his hands on his hips. "Lost your chance, Fraulein."

"I suppose the friendship is worth more than the hits a video of Tony Stark actually apologizing for something would have been. Just barely, though," Darcy told him, stuffing her phone back into the pocket of her jeans. "But I have to ask: what now?" She gestured to the lone remaining table of tools with nothing to use them on.

Tony's body language shifted from arrogant to uncertain. "Well, now is Phase Two. Come for a drive with me?"

Darcy walked over to him. "See, this is why I get worried. You changed from arrogant billionaire to Worried Friend in a split second, just now. Your guinea pig just got freaked out."

"Don't, okay? It'll be fine. Come out for a drive, help me see if it works, and we'll come back home and you can bake me a huge batch of 'Everything Is Perfect And I'm Not Dead' cookies," Tony said, placing his hands on her shoulders. Darcy looked up at his face, noted the confidence warring with anxiety in his eyes, and bit her lip.

"Take your flashiest car? If I'm going to die in a lab accident, I want to have a nice final memory," she said, mentally shoving down her worries in favor of the proffered adventure. "Besides, I didn't sign anything. If you kill me, my family will take you to the cleaners, Stark. Right, JARVIS?"

"A quick scan of your SHIELD paperwork does show a rather large liability gap that surviving family could possibly exploit, Miss Lewis."

"I'll never not be amused at your ability to wrap him around your finger," Tony said, releasing her shoulders and walking over to a door she never noticed before. He pressed a button, and the door slid sideways to reveal an elevator door.

"What, a Trek door but no teleporter? You are such a disappointment," Darcy said, walking over to stand beside him as they waited for the elevator. Tony's bark of laughter continued halfway down the tower.

Tony didn't let her pick the car, but the one he chose was plenty flashy. When she was buckling in, Darcy looked down at her t-shirt and over at Tony. "I admire your grace in not commenting on the Batman on my Comic Con shirt, but do you want me to change into something else before I become your test subject? Because that's what we're doing, right? All jokes aside?"

He leaned over to look at her, and amusement slowly formed on his face, starting at his eyes and growing to include a bright grin. "No, that shirt is… completely perfect, actually."

"Because it's a time machine, right? And my shirt says 2012? Tony, don't you dare strand me somewhere, or I will spend all the intervening time building a goddamned army to destroy you when we sync back up again!" Darcy threatened.

"Maybe that's my plan? Maybe I know of some big invading force that's coming soon, and my entire plan is to piss off my lab assistant so much that she raises an army to resist it," Tony said, starting up the car.

"I really don't know whether I was kidding, or you are," she griped.

Her uncertainty carried them all the way to their destination, and a few quick glances at Tony led Darcy to the conclusion that he too was a bit on edge. They pulled into a large garage and parked, but the door didn't close behind them.

"I want to walk around and go into the front," Tony told her when she looked at him in confusion as she got out of the car. She nodded and followed him as he walked around the outside perimeter fence. Tony unlocked the front gate and gestured to her to come inside, stopping to look up at the entrance of the mansion.

"Insert quip about overcompensating here," Darcy said, nudging him with her elbow as she stood beside him.

"What? I thought the overcompensation would have been the giant phallic tower," Tony laughed.

Darcy looked over at him and shook her head. "Nah, that one's too easy. Besides, I am guessing this was part of your inheritance. The person who was overcompensating here was doing it for a completely different symbolic reason than your tower. There's got to be how many rooms in this thing? And you don't even live here! I bet there's room for everyone and a few labs. Nah, I think this is about your dad," Darcy said, the momentum of her comments slowing by the time she approached that last statement. Tony Stark's relationship with his dad was absolutely not her business, and she hadn't meant to sound so decisive in her commentary about it. She walked around to stand partly in front of him with an apologetic expression on her face.

"No, you're right," Tony said, still looking at the elaborate entryway of the building. His jaw was set, but his eyes were vulnerable. "He gets what he wants, my dad." He sighed, and added, with a wry twist to his mouth that seemed to smooth all the rough and raw emotions away. "Eventually. Come on, let's go in."

They walked up to the door and Tony made a quip about ancient technology as he used his key to get in. Darcy made note of the grandness of the entryway before he led her around a corner and, of course, down a set of stairs.

"Always in the basement," Darcy griped. Tony turned to look at her quizzically. "The dangerous and life-threatening stuff. It's never on the main floor, there's always a bunch of doors and stairs as obstacles to getting away. It's like, a rule or something."

He chuckled. "Well in this case, it was more by necessity. We walked up a bit of a hill to get to the front, remember? The garage is on the main level of this part, and that's how we got it into the lab."

"Pfft, logic," Darcy scoffed.

Tony opened a door and gestured for her to walk in, and there the thing was. It looked larger and shinier somehow, and Darcy chalked that up to the lack of a platform for it to rest on, here. She turned to look at Tony. "This is where you ask me if I have any last words," she said. The confident tone she'd been going for was conspicuously missing, which might have had something to do with the dimness of the room and the faint ominous sense she had about the whole evening.

Tony's brows were furrowed, and his jaw was set again. His body language of stubbornness had started to trigger a flood of affection from her that Darcy found both frustrating and endearing. She suspected that Pepper did, too. From his pocket, Tony pulled out a circular metal case barely bigger than his palm. When he opened it, a glow lit up his face like a flashlight during a ghost story.

"Before you start, I just want you to know I know," Darcy told him impulsively. The shocked, slightly scared look Tony shot her upon hearing this was super worrisome.

"You know?" he asked her, his voice quiet and serious.

"Yep," Darcy nodded. "The punchline of the ghost story. The hook is attached to the door handle. You don't even have to try to scare me, I've heard it all before."

Tony actually shut the metal case with a snap and scrubbed a hand over his face in relieved exasperation. Then, he pointed at her. "You are hard work, did you know that?"

"I did, actually. You should have done a better job picking your lab rats. You might actually miss me when you activate that thing and it leaves me floating in space sometime in the early 2000s," Darcy said, walking over to the NTM and swinging herself up into the seat. "Is there a seatbelt?"

"You're not going to die in the vacuum of space. I wouldn't do that to you. I've been there before, it's very boring," Tony said, walking over to rest his hands on either side of the arch of metal she'd climbed through. The case with what she presumed was an arc reactor in it was still in his right hand.

"We're really good at hiding this stuff in flippant comments, aren't we?" Darcy asked quietly.

"Yeah."

"If you don't tell me what to do when I get there, how will I get back? Because I'm renaming this contraption. It's not the 'Not Time Machine' anymore. It's the 'Totally A Freaking Time Machine.' And TAFTM is a stupid acronym, that's how thrown I am by all of this. You've broken me, Stark." Darcy leaned her head against the framework near his hand. She made eye contact with him, held his gaze for a second, and then asked, slowly and deliberately, "Why me?"

Tony answered immediately, confidently. "Because I know you'll make it. It has to be you."

He was wearing that vulnerable, stubborn expression she'd recognized before. The weight of how important he clearly thought all of this was dragged the next words out of her.

"I trust you."

In response, he handed her the metal case, and she opened it to see the beautiful power supply she'd known would be in there. She traced the air above it for a few seconds before she handed it back.

"Okay, Doc Brown, do you have any admonitions not to steal an almanac full of money-making sports bets? A guide for how to save the hippogriff and how not to be seen? A rabbit suit and a set of instructions on how to strangle myself in utero?"

"You're an almanac all by yourself, Darcy Lewis," Tony told her from somewhere behind her. A clicking sound accompanied by a low frequency electric hum told her he'd set the arc reactor in place. "No instructions other than this: don't kill anyone, no matter how much they drive you crazy."

"That's super encouraging," Darcy said with thick sarcasm. She reached out toward the empty space where he'd been standing before, her heart suddenly full of anxiety. "This is just a test, right? To see if it works? Promise me I'll see you again, Tony. I don't know if I want to live in some crazy future with you not in it. Or the past, for that matter. What year were you born?"

Tony walked back into view and smiled at her. The smile definitely reached his eyes as he stretched his own hand out to grasp hers firmly.

"I promise you'll see me again."

Then, Tony squeezed her hand and let go. He walked behind her again and asked a single question, to which her answer was 'yes.'

"Ready?"

oOoOoOo

Even pop culture aficionados had their failings, sometimes. When the bright flash of light overtook her and she felt a sensation of moving, Darcy knew she should open her eyes and look around, so she could explain what her experience was like for future generations.

Instead, she closed her eyes and held on.

oOoOoOo

When Darcy opened her eyes again, the room didn't seem to have changed at all. She was still oriented toward the same view she had been when she'd first sat down! When she opened her hands Darcy felt the numbing pain of a truly strong grip enhanced by fear. She took stock of her situation-the room looked the same, so that meant… what? Did she arrive in a future where the room was empty because she and the Possibly A Time Machine had already left? Did she arrive in the past before the thing had even been placed in the room?

She climbed out of it gingerly and walked around to the back. Darcy couldn't prevent her startled laugh when she saw that beside the place in the machine that the arc reactor sat attached to the wiring was the metal box it had come from. Tony must have designed a pocket for its box to live in, and that told Darcy that she probably ought to take it out and put it inside.

Probably not with her fingers, though.

"Tony?" Darcy called out. Was he hiding, working in his lab because it's now last week, or was Tony not even born yet?

With a shrug, Darcy decided to try to see if the table of tools she could see against the far wall might have a set of tongs. She felt like it could be important to put the arc reactor in its case, though she didn't know for sure. It didn't actually take her too long to find a few tools that might work, and she was surprised and happy to find that moving the arc reactor from one place to another didn't seem like it was too catastrophic. Though, given how smart Tony was, he would have left her a specialized device welded into the damned thing if it had been necessary.

Which she hadn't bothered to search for.

Darcy gasped and examined every inch of the back of the PATM looking for just such a tool, the closed box with the arc reactor in it clutched close to her chest. It took twice as long as it had taken to actually move it to its box before she was completely sure that she hadn't done something very stupid by not checking first. She put out a hand to catch herself and sagged against the curved metal as her heart rate started to slow back to a more normal rhythm.

"Tony, I swear if this is the world's most elaborate episode of Punk'd, I'll team up with Pepper and bankrupt your ass!" she said into the dimly lit recesses of the room.

From somewhere else in the house, Darcy heard a man's voice call out, but the sound was too muffled to make sense of the words. Her heart rate started to pick up again, and Darcy looked at the metal case in her hand. She went to stuff it in a pocket, but it didn't fit.

"If that's my downfall after possibly managing to be the world's first time traveler, I'm going to spontaneously combust out of pure irony," Darcy said to herself. "'World War III Happens On Schedule Because of Lack of Adequate Pocket Space.'"

The voice called out again, and it sounded closer this time. Darcy shoved the arc reactor box into her waistband instead of using it like a flashlight, even though she couldn't really see anything.

"Stark?" she called out.

"Who's there?" the man's voice sounded like it was saying. It was closer than before.

Darcy told herself not to punch Tony when he appeared. Future Tony and Past Tony both would probably know his plans, but it was bad form to punch the person who helped you make history. Not like SHIELD would ever let her tell anyone…

"Stark? I'm in here!" Darcy shouted.

A door on the other side of the device burst open.

"Show yourself!" the man said.

It wasn't Tony's voice.

Darcy put her hands up, secure in the knowledge that her Comic Con shirt was a size too big (because of the boob space, of course), and thus raising her arms wouldn't reveal the box in her waistband.

"Here," she said, her voice shaky with the adrenaline. It was probably a caretaker for the house, but even so, she wasn't about to make any sudden moves, in case that caretaker was armed.

The man that walked around the Definitely A Time Machine was tall. His hair was dark, and so was the thin mustache on his upper lip. She couldn't see his eye color in the low light, but he looked familiar. He was wearing a suit, his cuffs were loose, and he had no tie. The top button of his white dress shirt was unbuttoned. As Darcy examined him, she saw that he was looking at her with equal interest. Something about his familiarity and the old fashioned haircut he wore made her feel strangely underdressed in her jeans and t-shirt. Darcy looked back up at his face and took a small step forward, trying to see him more clearly. As she did, he made eye contact with her.

"I'm going to make a guess," the man said. His voice was less resonant than she had expected, and he had a bit of a New York accent. "I'm not the Stark you were expecting."

His eyes were warm, assessing, and intelligent. Darcy suddenly realized where she'd seen him before, but she still doubted herself a little. This man was very young compared to the pictures she'd seen.

"I'm going to make a guess too," Darcy said softly, lowering her arms to her sides instead of holding them like a caught burglar. She kept her head still, even though she felt an urge to shake it back and forth, over and over and over until she woke back up in Tony Stark's presence again. "This is your house. You own it."

"I think we're both right," the man said.

He smiled, and Darcy closed her eyes for a few seconds. Her heart knew who this was (he's so young, holy FUCK, how far back did Tony send me?! Good God, I want to go back home RIGHT NOW), but her mind refused to let her say it even in her own head.

"How about one more guess?" he said, holding a hand out, palm down in front of himself soothingly. Darcy started to take deep calming breaths, and she nodded. "Where you came from-" and here, he broke off, shaking his head sideways as if his lips didn't want to obey the words he was trying to force into them. "Where you came from, I'm dead," he said, his eyes full of wonder. He stepped forward then, and the light hit his face.

He is handsome. Tony's dad is handsome, Darcy thought to herself. She'd tricked herself into acknowledging the thing she wasn't prepared to admit, and in doing so, she gave herself a mental shake. Tony's dad was TONY'S DAD, and he was a complete asshole, Darcy. Get a grip.

Somewhere deep inside her, as she nodded an unspoken answer to Stark's question, Darcy asked herself another one. Is he a jerk now? Is he a jerk yet? There was no way to know, but she knew how he would end up, and how much he would hurt her friend. She knew she needed to be careful.

"And I'm not born yet. Not by a long shot," Darcy said, letting out a bubble of inane laughter as she spoke.

Stark took another step toward her, now only about three feet away. "If the number on your shirt is a year, definitely not," he said, staring at her chest.

Darcy crossed her arms. "Eyes off of Batman and his friends, please," she said in a cross voice.

Stark burst out laughing, clapping his hands together in amusement. "You are exactly the kind of person I'd hope would be associated with my heirs someday," he told her admiringly. "Feisty and beautiful."

"Watch it, old man, I could be your granddaughter," Darcy said, stepping away from him several paces.

His eyes narrowed. They were brown, she saw. Just like Tony's. "Not a chance," he said softly. "Stark genes are pretty strong. I'd know."

They looked at each other for a long moment, and Darcy felt very off-balance, despite her obvious advantages over him. If Howard Stark was this young, it was probably not even 1950 yet, and Darcy knew sixty plus years' worth of history full of things that he could hardly even dream of. She barely knew anything about the 40's and 50's, though, and this man standing in front of her certainly did.

"Did you come for a reason? The misuse of the Super Soldier?" Stark asked, a thread of barely contained excitement in his voice. "And the device!" he said, a gasp of shock accompanying his words as if he'd somehow forgotten it was there until just that moment. "Did I build this? Did one of my heirs?"

As Stark turned away from her to look hungrily at the Absolutely A Time Machine, Darcy thought about his question. If she remembered her history correctly, there was a very short series of months during which Steve Rogers had been successfully transformed into a super soldier but was being used for propaganda films instead of something more appropriate. But that had been over a year before the war had ended!

Even if Darcy did raise up an army of eighteen year olds to kick Tony Stark's ass for sending her back so far in time, they'd all be senior citizens by the time they got there. Even Darcy herself. Hell, Tony wasn't even due to be born for another… what? Thirty years?!

She had to go back.

"Your face is very expressive," the elder Stark told her, interrupting her reverie. "That number on your shirt, 2012. That stands for the year, doesn't it?"

Darcy gave in to the urge to cover her mouth in response to the shock of her realizations. "Yes," she said against the warmth of her fingers. "He said he'd see me again," she said next, a film of tears obscuring the image of the man in front of her and the time machine he was standing beside. "He could not have meant as a baby, could he? He wouldn't have-" she broke off, shutting her eyes and feeling the tears dislodge and fall.

"I'll bet you are talking about my grandson," Stark said, his unfamiliar voice reminding her that even with her eyes shut, she had evidence that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. "And I'll further bet that he had a reason. The question is, does he have any kind of security clearance to know what I have been doing?"

"Just how long do you think those things stay classified for?" Darcy asked, her eyes still closed. She didn't correct his guess. "It's what? 1943? 1944? That's almost seventy years!"

"The things that no one finds out about stay classified forever," Stark said quietly. "Speaking of which, this? This is probably one of those things."

Darcy opened her eyes to see Stark hovering his hands almost reverently over the wiring and switches on the back of the time machine.

"Wait," he said, crouching down to examine something. Darcy knew exactly what it was, and she wasn't even surprised that it hadn't taken him very long to find it. "Something's missing. The power supply."

"If you had that piece, could you figure out how to send me back?" Darcy whispered. She felt incredibly vulnerable. She knew no resistance tactics, nothing about how to keep secret things from being revealed during an interrogation. Howard Stark was definitely on the right side of history when it came to World War II, but Darcy knew things that could change large swathes of history just by pure advanced warning alone. What's worse, she didn't know enough about them to be able to fudge details to obscure their significance. A sharp, metallic taste filled her mouth and her heart raced. She hoped to hell that Stark was too enamoured of the device in front of him to notice.

"Of course I could," Stark said without any hesitation. "All it takes is motivation."

He turned to look at her, still crouched in front of the time machine, and Darcy didn't know the man, but she knew that look. It was calculating, that look. It was full of meaning. It was full of promise.