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The object of this challenge was to get a random word from the dictionary. When I saw my word, I realized I had the beginning of a story that would work well for the word. The first couple of hundred words of this had been sitting on my computer for awhile and I decided I needed to get it out and finish it.
Title: First Kiss
Fandom: Avengers MCU
Your Word: Contrite
Word Count: 2546
Rating: Teen
Pairings: Darcy/Steve
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): slight spoilers for Iron Man 3
Summary: Darcy likes Steve. Steve seems to like Darcy. So why is it so hard to get a kiss?
Darcy had always attracted geeks. The kind of boy that wanted to date her had probably been asthmatic as a child and, more than likely, still carried an inhaler. They wore thick-rimmed glasses but still squinted, probably from habit. All the geeks she’d ever kissed (solely her idea) had kept their eyes firmly closed and preferred that everything else be done in the dark.
No one looked at Steve Rogers and thought to call him a geek. Even up close, when imperfections were instantly noticeable, he was the kind of perfect that could take a girl’s breath away for a good long while. When he was looking strong and dependable, her heart fluttered. When he smiled... god help her, it made her feel like she was having a heart attack. A good kind of heart attack, if there was such a thing.
Every Friday, like clockwork, Steve walked down four floors of stairs and waited while Darcy finished up her hair or her makeup or whatever it was that she couldn’t seem to get perfect the first time around. For months, she tried to find just the right combination that would have him clamoring for more. She tried Forties Starlet (an easy place to start that seemed to leave him uncomfortable... and not in the good way) and Eighties Rocker (a little too far to the otherside so that even she felt silly) but neither one seemed to impress him so she strayed into new territory with Naive Waif (he asked her if he needed to take her to the hospital) and Dramatic Diva (this mostly meant she wore sequins which was too much for the tiny pizza joint they went to).
Nothing she did seemed to get her any closer to that first kiss with Steve. “What am I doing?” she moaned to Bruce. It should have been Jane that she moaned to but she was holed up at SHIELD headquarters for the foreseeable future so it was poor Bruce that had to bear the brunt of her drama. “Nothing I’ve tried has impressed him.”
“Impress him? You’re trying to impress Steve? That’s not going to get you kissed.” When she looked confused (and rightly so, as he didn’t seem to be on the same page as her when it came to The Plan), he pulled off his glasses and rubbed a hand over his face. “So those guys you told me about. Those geeks.”
Darcy blinked. The geek part of the conversation had been days ago. She’d felt the need to explain to Bruce what it was that she was telling Jane. To her credit, she gave him the shortened version and only made him listen to her history back to high school. Oh, the horrors she could have inflicted on him with those stories.
The fact that he’d listened to her at all had her so flummoxed that she could only nod. He took it as an indication that they understood each other when she really meant it as a way of clearing the buzzing in her ears. Surely he hadn’t been listening to everything she’d said in his presence. Had he? No one else in the history of world had ever listened to her before.
“What did you do to impress the geeks?”
“I hung out with them.” Darcy really did try to think of a better answer but that was it. She’d been willing to listen to endless prattle about the latest siege on the tower in their D&D game or what configuration they were putting into their newest processor. It hadn’t taken more than a listening ear for them to get horny. “I listened when they talked instead of walking away.”
Bruce’s expression changed from Teaching Moment to Oh Good She Understand and he slipped his glasses back on, relieved to get back to work. But Darcy didn’t get it. Or not quite because it couldn’t be that easy. “Steve isn’t a geek.”
“Honey,” his voice was full of exasperated patience, “all boys are geeks, down deep. He doesn’t need you to be something you aren’t. He just needs to know that you care.”
Instead of taking Bruce’s word for gospel, she decided to run some experiments first. It wasn’t like she had anything to lose, after all. Honest to god, she was going to implement her devious plan but then the oil rig happened and things got muddled and horrible and Steve wasn’t talking. To her. To anyone. Then he wasn’t around at all, as if he’d decided it was easier not to talk if he wasn’t forced to be around people.
Bruce was busy sorting out everything that had gone wrong with Pepper and Tony so he wasn’t around for her to talk to about what she was feeling. Jane was right at the cusp of figuring out the bridge to Asgard and SHIELD was making sure she was eating so there was no use in Darcy trying to get in to see her with any good excuse. Even Clint and Natasha, always her last choice for a heart-to-heart seeing as they didn’t have much use for her prattle, weren’t around.
For the first time in her life, Darcy was alone. With all the thoughts she was having, this was not the time to be alone with nothing to do. Twiddling her thumbs and going slowly insane was out of the question so she began cleaning. The robots didn’t like that she was taking over their function but she figure how to turn them off (Tony wasn’t going to be happy when he found that she’d tinkered with what she could only imagine he thought of as his children) so they couldn’t put up much of a fuss. Each morning, she pulled her hair up into a messy bun or wrapped it in a scarf, put on her scruffiest clothes and picked a part of the Tower to clean. Bedrooms were off-limits but she figured out how to override all the security codes so that she could at least freshen up the entry ways.
While she cleaned, she talked to herself. It was better than nothing. Better than putting her tail between her legs and begging to be let into SHIELD headquarters. Fury had taken special glee in escorting her out that first day and she’d only made it worse, thumbing her nose at him and telling him she didn’t want to be in his little club. It wasn’t in Darcy’s personality to be contrite so she fought the urge as best as she could.
That didn’t mean that she didn’t work herself into a crying fit nearly every day. Exhausted, she fell onto the couch (the one that could fit five people if it needed to, poor thing) with a cup of tea at the end of each day and watched the sun set over New York as she valiantly worked to stifle her pathetic sobs.
On this particular evening, the elevator dinged but the sound didn’t register. She’d long since overridden all the automatic lights so that she had to find the switch when she walked into the room. After JARVIS going off line, it had seemed like the right thing to do and she’d never gotten around to putting them back the way they’d been. There was a muttered expletive from the doorway, indicating that maybe she should have gotten around to that sooner rather than later. It was said with such apology that she knew who it was without having to see for herself.
She climbed up on her knees to lean on the back of the huge couch. “Steve?”
“Darcy? What are you doing here?”
“It’s where I... live.” It took a couple of deep breaths and some intense sniffling before she was composed enough to speak again. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”
He moved forward toward the window where the only light in the room came streaming in from the sunset. “I thought I’d come check in.”
It was impossible to choke back her sobs as the loneliness of the last weeks crashed in on her again. Steve was just here for a short time before he was off again. Something cemented inside her, proof that the thoughts she’d been having weren’t that far off base. “You’ll have to leave a note because no one else is around.”
“You’re here all alone?”
“I have been. I think it’s about time I find another occupation. Tony’s house doesn’t need a sitter when he’s away.” Resolution dried her tears and stiffened her spine. “I’ll just have to read about your exploits in the papers with the rest of the world.”
“Does SHIELD have a job for you?” Steve sounded so unbelievably sweet that Darcy thought about lying. She could have come up with a good job description on the spot, one that made her sound like she had a place in society, but she didn’t like lying to people she wanted to someday kiss.
But kissing was probably out of the question these days. Still, lying to Steve seemed inherently wrong. So she went with the truth. The whole truth. “I’ve been a deadweight ever since Jane got saddled with me as her assistant my sophomore year. I’m a Political Science major with no real way of earning a living. I’ve discovered that I’m really good at cleaning house and I’ve been able to keep myself alive with whatever I’ve found in the pantry but I don’t know if I could do it for any larger crowd. Besides, I’m so tired of being-”
He succeeded in finding the light switch. It was such an abrupt change that Darcy blinked and lost her train of thought for a moment. She was silent for a moment longer as she took in Steve’s tired eyes and sagging shoulders. He was wearing a ripped t-shirt that was a size too small and jeans that were two sizes too big, as if he’d decided to take on Bruce’s gig and find himself depending on others for clothes after it was all said and done.
“Have you been crying?”
Darcy wiped at her cheeks, surprised that they were still wet. It was pathetic how much she’d cried lately but there was still more there to come out. “When haven’t I been crying?” she muttered, not thinking about Steve’s better-than-most hearing. When he sank down in front of her, the couch keeping them separate enough that it wasn’t exactly a hug even though his hands were on her shoulders. Darcy traced a fading bruise on Steve’s cheek. “Have you been fighting?”
“When haven’t I been fighting?” he asked, with a laugh in his voice that made her smile. “But this isn’t about me. This is about you. Why have you been crying?”
“Because I’m lonely and useless. Is there a better reason than that?” Before he could answer, she warmed up on the subject and answered her own question. “There is a better reason. I’m crying because I’m going to leave before I get a kiss from you. How about that for pathetic? I couldn’t even figure out what you liked enough in a girl to get you to kiss me. That’s what I called pathetic.”
The kiss was quick, barely a cover of his lips on hers. When he pulled back, he asked, “Should I apologize?”
“For kissing me?” She put a hand on her cheek, suddenly conscious that she wasn’t wearing any makeup and hadn’t washed her hair for a few days. This was not a time for seduction.
“For not kissing you. I kept talking myself out of it. You seemed out of my league even though Bruce kept telling me there wasn’t such a thing as leagues anymore. It’s supposed to be more free form, these days.”
That two-timer Bruce had talked to both of them? That was a bit infuriating, considering they could have saved a lot of time if he’d just hinted that he was confidant to everyone in the relationship. “What else did Bruce tell you?”
“That you would act like you were offended that I offered to pay for things on our dates but not to listen to you because you secretly liked it. And that I shouldn’t worry about getting physical because it would happen on its own, when we were ready. He seemed to think that might be a worry of mine.”
So Bruce knew a thing or two about relationships. That shouldn’t surprise her even though it did. “For the most part, he’s right.”
“What part did he get wrong?”
She shrugged. “It’s another conversation for another time. Will we count that as our first kiss?”
His smile was less innocent and a lot more devil-may-care this time. “Did you like it?”
“I liked the idea of it but I think we could do better.”
This time, he leaned in slow so that she could meet him halfway at her own speed. His hand came up to stroke along her jaw as his tongue teased at the seam of her lips. She gave in without much fight but pulled back as a thought struck her. “Getting physical isn’t a worry of yours? And why are you so good at this kissing thing?”
“I missed out on things like television programs of the 1970s, Darcy. Not whatever sexual revolution everyone thought that same time period was. I travelled with a troupe of USO dancers. You don’t think they treated me like a little brother, do you?”
“But Tony-”
“Knows nothing. I think he takes perverse pleasure in thinking I’m the last American virgin. I let him. It’s easier than having to tell stories of my exploits.”
“Gods, Steve. You thought you were out of my league? I think I need to be more worried about being out of your league. I don’t think I can compare with those other girls.”
He shrugged, a little bit of color tinging his cheeks. “They were a pleasurable distraction. Not something I’m looking to duplicate. Now that we’ve taken care of the kissing issue, can we talk about the other thing on your list?”
“What list?”
“The one where you felt unneeded and lonely.”
This time, it was Darcy’s turn to blush. “Oh, right. That.”
“What if I told you that I had a job that needed a Political Science major to do it? Would you be interested in hearing more about it?”
There was a part of her that thought about turning him down, sight unseen. A job was a job. A job would make her feel useful. “I would like to hear more about it. I should probably reprogram all of Tony’s machines before I do anything major though.” Darcy reached out to grab hold of the frayed collar. “And maybe we don’t do anything tonight. You look like you need some TLC.”
“Is that something in your skill set?”
“Oh, I got my eye on getting an Associates in taking care of Captain America. Head of the class, all the way. Think you can use someone like that?”
“I think I can find a few things for you to do.”
This time, when they kissed, Steve didn’t let Darcy pull away for a good long while.
Title: First Kiss
Fandom: Avengers MCU
Your Word: Contrite
Word Count: 2546
Rating: Teen
Pairings: Darcy/Steve
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc): slight spoilers for Iron Man 3
Summary: Darcy likes Steve. Steve seems to like Darcy. So why is it so hard to get a kiss?
Darcy had always attracted geeks. The kind of boy that wanted to date her had probably been asthmatic as a child and, more than likely, still carried an inhaler. They wore thick-rimmed glasses but still squinted, probably from habit. All the geeks she’d ever kissed (solely her idea) had kept their eyes firmly closed and preferred that everything else be done in the dark.
No one looked at Steve Rogers and thought to call him a geek. Even up close, when imperfections were instantly noticeable, he was the kind of perfect that could take a girl’s breath away for a good long while. When he was looking strong and dependable, her heart fluttered. When he smiled... god help her, it made her feel like she was having a heart attack. A good kind of heart attack, if there was such a thing.
Every Friday, like clockwork, Steve walked down four floors of stairs and waited while Darcy finished up her hair or her makeup or whatever it was that she couldn’t seem to get perfect the first time around. For months, she tried to find just the right combination that would have him clamoring for more. She tried Forties Starlet (an easy place to start that seemed to leave him uncomfortable... and not in the good way) and Eighties Rocker (a little too far to the otherside so that even she felt silly) but neither one seemed to impress him so she strayed into new territory with Naive Waif (he asked her if he needed to take her to the hospital) and Dramatic Diva (this mostly meant she wore sequins which was too much for the tiny pizza joint they went to).
Nothing she did seemed to get her any closer to that first kiss with Steve. “What am I doing?” she moaned to Bruce. It should have been Jane that she moaned to but she was holed up at SHIELD headquarters for the foreseeable future so it was poor Bruce that had to bear the brunt of her drama. “Nothing I’ve tried has impressed him.”
“Impress him? You’re trying to impress Steve? That’s not going to get you kissed.” When she looked confused (and rightly so, as he didn’t seem to be on the same page as her when it came to The Plan), he pulled off his glasses and rubbed a hand over his face. “So those guys you told me about. Those geeks.”
Darcy blinked. The geek part of the conversation had been days ago. She’d felt the need to explain to Bruce what it was that she was telling Jane. To her credit, she gave him the shortened version and only made him listen to her history back to high school. Oh, the horrors she could have inflicted on him with those stories.
The fact that he’d listened to her at all had her so flummoxed that she could only nod. He took it as an indication that they understood each other when she really meant it as a way of clearing the buzzing in her ears. Surely he hadn’t been listening to everything she’d said in his presence. Had he? No one else in the history of world had ever listened to her before.
“What did you do to impress the geeks?”
“I hung out with them.” Darcy really did try to think of a better answer but that was it. She’d been willing to listen to endless prattle about the latest siege on the tower in their D&D game or what configuration they were putting into their newest processor. It hadn’t taken more than a listening ear for them to get horny. “I listened when they talked instead of walking away.”
Bruce’s expression changed from Teaching Moment to Oh Good She Understand and he slipped his glasses back on, relieved to get back to work. But Darcy didn’t get it. Or not quite because it couldn’t be that easy. “Steve isn’t a geek.”
“Honey,” his voice was full of exasperated patience, “all boys are geeks, down deep. He doesn’t need you to be something you aren’t. He just needs to know that you care.”
Instead of taking Bruce’s word for gospel, she decided to run some experiments first. It wasn’t like she had anything to lose, after all. Honest to god, she was going to implement her devious plan but then the oil rig happened and things got muddled and horrible and Steve wasn’t talking. To her. To anyone. Then he wasn’t around at all, as if he’d decided it was easier not to talk if he wasn’t forced to be around people.
Bruce was busy sorting out everything that had gone wrong with Pepper and Tony so he wasn’t around for her to talk to about what she was feeling. Jane was right at the cusp of figuring out the bridge to Asgard and SHIELD was making sure she was eating so there was no use in Darcy trying to get in to see her with any good excuse. Even Clint and Natasha, always her last choice for a heart-to-heart seeing as they didn’t have much use for her prattle, weren’t around.
For the first time in her life, Darcy was alone. With all the thoughts she was having, this was not the time to be alone with nothing to do. Twiddling her thumbs and going slowly insane was out of the question so she began cleaning. The robots didn’t like that she was taking over their function but she figure how to turn them off (Tony wasn’t going to be happy when he found that she’d tinkered with what she could only imagine he thought of as his children) so they couldn’t put up much of a fuss. Each morning, she pulled her hair up into a messy bun or wrapped it in a scarf, put on her scruffiest clothes and picked a part of the Tower to clean. Bedrooms were off-limits but she figured out how to override all the security codes so that she could at least freshen up the entry ways.
While she cleaned, she talked to herself. It was better than nothing. Better than putting her tail between her legs and begging to be let into SHIELD headquarters. Fury had taken special glee in escorting her out that first day and she’d only made it worse, thumbing her nose at him and telling him she didn’t want to be in his little club. It wasn’t in Darcy’s personality to be contrite so she fought the urge as best as she could.
That didn’t mean that she didn’t work herself into a crying fit nearly every day. Exhausted, she fell onto the couch (the one that could fit five people if it needed to, poor thing) with a cup of tea at the end of each day and watched the sun set over New York as she valiantly worked to stifle her pathetic sobs.
On this particular evening, the elevator dinged but the sound didn’t register. She’d long since overridden all the automatic lights so that she had to find the switch when she walked into the room. After JARVIS going off line, it had seemed like the right thing to do and she’d never gotten around to putting them back the way they’d been. There was a muttered expletive from the doorway, indicating that maybe she should have gotten around to that sooner rather than later. It was said with such apology that she knew who it was without having to see for herself.
She climbed up on her knees to lean on the back of the huge couch. “Steve?”
“Darcy? What are you doing here?”
“It’s where I... live.” It took a couple of deep breaths and some intense sniffling before she was composed enough to speak again. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”
He moved forward toward the window where the only light in the room came streaming in from the sunset. “I thought I’d come check in.”
It was impossible to choke back her sobs as the loneliness of the last weeks crashed in on her again. Steve was just here for a short time before he was off again. Something cemented inside her, proof that the thoughts she’d been having weren’t that far off base. “You’ll have to leave a note because no one else is around.”
“You’re here all alone?”
“I have been. I think it’s about time I find another occupation. Tony’s house doesn’t need a sitter when he’s away.” Resolution dried her tears and stiffened her spine. “I’ll just have to read about your exploits in the papers with the rest of the world.”
“Does SHIELD have a job for you?” Steve sounded so unbelievably sweet that Darcy thought about lying. She could have come up with a good job description on the spot, one that made her sound like she had a place in society, but she didn’t like lying to people she wanted to someday kiss.
But kissing was probably out of the question these days. Still, lying to Steve seemed inherently wrong. So she went with the truth. The whole truth. “I’ve been a deadweight ever since Jane got saddled with me as her assistant my sophomore year. I’m a Political Science major with no real way of earning a living. I’ve discovered that I’m really good at cleaning house and I’ve been able to keep myself alive with whatever I’ve found in the pantry but I don’t know if I could do it for any larger crowd. Besides, I’m so tired of being-”
He succeeded in finding the light switch. It was such an abrupt change that Darcy blinked and lost her train of thought for a moment. She was silent for a moment longer as she took in Steve’s tired eyes and sagging shoulders. He was wearing a ripped t-shirt that was a size too small and jeans that were two sizes too big, as if he’d decided to take on Bruce’s gig and find himself depending on others for clothes after it was all said and done.
“Have you been crying?”
Darcy wiped at her cheeks, surprised that they were still wet. It was pathetic how much she’d cried lately but there was still more there to come out. “When haven’t I been crying?” she muttered, not thinking about Steve’s better-than-most hearing. When he sank down in front of her, the couch keeping them separate enough that it wasn’t exactly a hug even though his hands were on her shoulders. Darcy traced a fading bruise on Steve’s cheek. “Have you been fighting?”
“When haven’t I been fighting?” he asked, with a laugh in his voice that made her smile. “But this isn’t about me. This is about you. Why have you been crying?”
“Because I’m lonely and useless. Is there a better reason than that?” Before he could answer, she warmed up on the subject and answered her own question. “There is a better reason. I’m crying because I’m going to leave before I get a kiss from you. How about that for pathetic? I couldn’t even figure out what you liked enough in a girl to get you to kiss me. That’s what I called pathetic.”
The kiss was quick, barely a cover of his lips on hers. When he pulled back, he asked, “Should I apologize?”
“For kissing me?” She put a hand on her cheek, suddenly conscious that she wasn’t wearing any makeup and hadn’t washed her hair for a few days. This was not a time for seduction.
“For not kissing you. I kept talking myself out of it. You seemed out of my league even though Bruce kept telling me there wasn’t such a thing as leagues anymore. It’s supposed to be more free form, these days.”
That two-timer Bruce had talked to both of them? That was a bit infuriating, considering they could have saved a lot of time if he’d just hinted that he was confidant to everyone in the relationship. “What else did Bruce tell you?”
“That you would act like you were offended that I offered to pay for things on our dates but not to listen to you because you secretly liked it. And that I shouldn’t worry about getting physical because it would happen on its own, when we were ready. He seemed to think that might be a worry of mine.”
So Bruce knew a thing or two about relationships. That shouldn’t surprise her even though it did. “For the most part, he’s right.”
“What part did he get wrong?”
She shrugged. “It’s another conversation for another time. Will we count that as our first kiss?”
His smile was less innocent and a lot more devil-may-care this time. “Did you like it?”
“I liked the idea of it but I think we could do better.”
This time, he leaned in slow so that she could meet him halfway at her own speed. His hand came up to stroke along her jaw as his tongue teased at the seam of her lips. She gave in without much fight but pulled back as a thought struck her. “Getting physical isn’t a worry of yours? And why are you so good at this kissing thing?”
“I missed out on things like television programs of the 1970s, Darcy. Not whatever sexual revolution everyone thought that same time period was. I travelled with a troupe of USO dancers. You don’t think they treated me like a little brother, do you?”
“But Tony-”
“Knows nothing. I think he takes perverse pleasure in thinking I’m the last American virgin. I let him. It’s easier than having to tell stories of my exploits.”
“Gods, Steve. You thought you were out of my league? I think I need to be more worried about being out of your league. I don’t think I can compare with those other girls.”
He shrugged, a little bit of color tinging his cheeks. “They were a pleasurable distraction. Not something I’m looking to duplicate. Now that we’ve taken care of the kissing issue, can we talk about the other thing on your list?”
“What list?”
“The one where you felt unneeded and lonely.”
This time, it was Darcy’s turn to blush. “Oh, right. That.”
“What if I told you that I had a job that needed a Political Science major to do it? Would you be interested in hearing more about it?”
There was a part of her that thought about turning him down, sight unseen. A job was a job. A job would make her feel useful. “I would like to hear more about it. I should probably reprogram all of Tony’s machines before I do anything major though.” Darcy reached out to grab hold of the frayed collar. “And maybe we don’t do anything tonight. You look like you need some TLC.”
“Is that something in your skill set?”
“Oh, I got my eye on getting an Associates in taking care of Captain America. Head of the class, all the way. Think you can use someone like that?”
“I think I can find a few things for you to do.”
This time, when they kissed, Steve didn’t let Darcy pull away for a good long while.
