Chapter Text
Darcy blinks at him.
Her clutch-brother raises his eyebrows back at her, and she can't help but startle as the realization really hits home. Her sudden movement knocks Bingley off his feet and onto his human form butt with a shrill shriek. Then her grounded clutch-brother yelps in protest as Darcy drinks him in with her eyes and breathes in his familiar scent as a drowning man would gasp in air.
Bingley smacks at her snout, which dwarfs him easily. “Did a part of your brain get knocked loose?” he demands, trying to push her nose away from his stomach with absolutely no luck or real strength. “Get off!”
“I thought you were dead!” Darcy snaps down at him, distantly aware that this is really, really strange because she's never been in her dragon form while her brother is still in his human form. Seriously, she's not kidding, it hasn't ever happened in over a thousand years – and Bingley looks really disheveled and filthy on top of that.
Wait, why is she in her dragon form? How is Bingley here? Why does her clutch-brother's hoodie have a massive tear through the 'L' of Culver? Why is the fabric almost drenched through with his blood? Why are they not both dead? (Are they dead?) What happened? And... wait... is that...?
Darcy lifts her head from her clutch-brother to stare at the second, shorter figure.
“...Jane?”
Jane, looking a little disheveled and bloody herself, raises a hand in greeting. “Hey,” she says, giving an adorable little grin as she looks between Darcy's stunned surprise and Bingley's grumbling as he pulls himself off the ground and moves to stand next to the human.
Darcy's hindquarters thump back down, knees going weak from shock, and shake the ground. Bingley and Jane wobble slightly, but neither fall. Darcy looks between the clutch-brother she'd believed to be dead and the friend she was fairly certain that she'd basically killed.
“What...?” she manages, voice and eyes watery.
“The Frost Giant jackass got the drop on me,” Bingley grumbles, shoving his hands into the bloody pocket of his ruined hoodie. He looks down at the hole in his clothes unhappily, like he's just remembered that it's there, and says petulantly, “He stabbed me through the chest. It took longer to fix than usual and then I got lost on that dumb flying station.”
“Stabbed... through the chest,” Darcy repeats, feeling a faint headache start to bloom in her skull. Of course her clutch-brother is complaining at her because he got himself stabbed through the chest, and then apparently got lost on the helicarrier. That's so him.
“And when I finally found my way out of that human-made mess, ” Bingley continues as though she hadn't said anything, “I find you getting yourself blasted off its side by the Frost Giant jackass!” He glares accusingly at her then. “What did you do to yourself?”
“Wha-”
“Your human form was wrecked! You were partly shifted as you were falling! Your form was completely unstable; it made catching you absolute hell!” Bingley rants, bloody chest swelling so that he might as well be breathing fire, glaring fearlessly and furiously up at her. “You bones were completely bent out of shape! I had to return you to your natural form for you own good and if you dare try to make yourself human-shaped again anytime soon, I will personally pluck your scales!”
Darcy just blinks at him again, because he's never turned her own threat back on her before and that takes her more than a moment to process. Usually it's her telling him off for doing reckless things or being a twit. It feels like the world's been turned upside-down to have Bingley in a human shape and yelling at her in her dragon shape for being experimentally stupid. Maybe she really is dead.
'Wait, you shifted my form?” Darcy demands of her clutch-brother. She didn't know that he could do that. It feels like he shouldn't have been able to do that.
Bingley sniffs, obviously offended at the idea he couldn't. “It wasn't easy, but yes,” he says, eyeing her with an unhappy expression and uncomfortable posture. “Being stuck between forms was...” Bingley trails off and looks away, going entirely silent.
Jane puts a hand on Bingley's arm and Darcy looks at her friend.
“It looked like you were having a seizure,” Jane finishes for Bingley, who doesn't say anything but doesn't shake off Jane's hand either, which says a hell of a lot. Darcy must have really scared her clutch-brother if he's alternating between the silent treatment and threatening to pluck her scales.
“Are you okay?” Darcy asks Jane, just to be certain. Jane seems fine and healthy, but Darcy can remember all too well the sharp and unfortunately distracting spike of pain when Loki's soldier stabbed Jane and then pushed her off the helicarrier.
Jane looks disbelieving for a moment, then sighs. “I'm fine,” she answers, shifting her grip on Bingley's arm. He turns her head towards her and Jane grins gratefully up at him. “Apparently the amount of angst you'd feel if I died is an annoying enough prospect for your brother to consider my life worth saving too.”
Bingley scoffs, but the sound is fond.
Darcy hums at him. “I didn't know you still had such an interest in being a doctor, Bing,” she teases, flinging out a joke while she attempts to deal with overwhelming emotions and the aching burn in her chest. She hurts, but she's alive, and so are they.
“It was a bad stab,” Bingley replies, having never displayed any such interest, disdainful and scathing enough to probably make the Loki-controlled soldier that stabbed Jane cry of villainous shame. “And it would be pathetic if I could not manage so little with my magical prowess and being forced to create and spend so much time in a human-like form.”
Then he turns sharp eyes on her. “Your wounds, on the other hand, were not so easy. I believe that your chest will ultimately be... fine... with time, but it is currently very...” Bingley's face screws up like he either can't find the word or can't believe he's saying it. “...burned.”
Darcy rubs her aching belly against the ground and grits her teeth at the immediate pain that swells up. There's a lot of stretch and pull and just burn in her chest. She can feel the scratch of loose scales, and hear the scrape and clink of more scales falling off. Darcy almost wants to take a look at her belly, see what it looks like between the helicopter scars and the scepter blast, but she already knows that it'll basically be summed up as hot fucking mess. She might puke if she actually looks at it.
“You will not be shifting into a human form anytime soon,” Bingley says firmly, eyes blazing gold.
“...Yeah,” Darcy agrees weakly, claws clenching again and again into the ground. She needs a distraction. “Do we know what's... happening right now?”
Bingley stares blankly at her, but Jane catches onto her meaning. “What happened to the helicarrier?” Jane asks, grimacing as Darcy nods. “No. I passed out when we were falling, so I haven't seen it since then.” She spreads her palms in a Jane-ish gesture of the complete nada of data that they have, exclaiming, “I lost my phone too, so... no contact with the Earth! We don't have a clue what's going on with anyone else.”
“Oh, that was your new one, wasn't it?”
Jane sighs. “Yep.”
Darcy frowns on her friend's behalf. “Man, your mom is going to be pissed about you ruining the family plan. That's like the third one this year, right?”
“Could you discuss something more inane and unimportant?” Bingley demands, inserting himself into the conversation as pissily as ever. “As far as we know, the flying blender hasn't fallen from the sky, but the Frost Giant jackass got away while I was busy saving you and is presumably doing something horrible again.” An almost hateful expression crosses his face. “Can't you feel that?”
Darcy, in the middle of stretching out her aching neck, turns her massive head around to stare at her clutch-brother in open confusion. She has no idea what the fuck he's talk about. “Feel what?”
Bingley's eyes go wide, then he half-blurts and half-shouts, “How can you not feel that?!”
“In excruciating pain here, thank you very much!” Darcy howls back at him. How the hell is she supposed to feeling anything besides the chest that got attacked by helicopter blades and then blasted by a mystery weapon of evil? And she's pretty sure she's still got bruises from the goddamn Hulk on top of that!
“CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN FOR THE HUMAN, PLEASE?” Jane shouts.
Bingley's mouth snaps closed on what was probably a rant of insults, looking between Darcy and Jane with an extremely disgruntled expression. “I can sense something nearly identical to what we felt before you left to confront the Frost Giant for the first time,” he says, staring expectantly at Darcy. “Only much stronger than before. Can't you feel it?”
Darcy stares at him for a moment, then raises her head, trying her best to block out the pain and stretch out her senses. Now that Bingley's brought it up and she's looking for it, she manages she fixate on the wrong feeling among the burning in her chest and dizziness in her head. He's right; it's almost the exact same tearing disturbance that Loki arrived with, that same kind of pulsing wound as the one that ripped that SHIELD facility apart into a pile of rubble while she was focused on her Erik.
The scepter seems to be there with it, but it's incredibly, incredible small next to the powerful burn of energy slowly rising. It's very like the scepter, but not quite, stinking of something that Darcy hadn't felt since that SHIELD facility got wrecked and she lost Loki in the desert chase. Now that she's paying attention, it seems unbelievable that she didn't notice it before.
“The Tesseract,” Darcy guesses, although it comes out sounding much more certain and dark than just a guess. But what else could be it? “Loki's not hiding it anymore.”
Jane's face is a picture of nervousness and thought. “I want to ask if the magic just wore off or something,” she says hesitantly, “but it's much more likely that he doesn't need to anymore, isn't it? Or that he's going something so big that he can't. Or both.”
A dark, worried feeling settles itself in Darcy's chest, under the burning pain. She thinks Jane has hit the head of the nail precisely there, which is a great supposition but a very bad thing if she's right.
That's... that a lot of power being accumulated, rising and falling with a beat that's almost similar to a steadily quickening heartbeat. That same power ripped a massive building to shreds and Darcy's fairly sure that no one was really trying to do that. If the Tesseract is an Infinity Stone like the Stone of Stars, then the Earth could easily be next.
Her only comfort is that Loki seems to want to rule Earth, rather than destroy it, even if his plans for it seem terrible. But that's not much comfort at all, because there are a still a lot of things that a clever and competent magic-user can do with a powerful weapon. The abilities of that awful scepter are bad enough, but an actual Infinity Stone? It's hard not to shudder.
If Loki doesn't need to hide anymore, then that's definitely bad, but then... where's Erik? Darcy still can't feel Erik, and that both bodes badly and pisses her the hell off. Actually, Loki and everything he does in general just pisses her the hell off. She owes him some fire.
“We need to stop whatever he's doing,” Darcy says without really thinking about it or thinking it through.
Once she's said it and realized she did, however, she doesn't take it back. Because Loki still has her Erik, he's probably about to end life on Earth as they know it and Darcy doesn't want that to happen, and she needs to tear him limb from limb and then set his scraps on fires for a ridiculously long list of reasons. (Trying to kill her, trying to kill Jane, trying to kill Bingley, actually killing his brother, having a really annoying face, etc.)
She looks at the human-shaped dragon standing next to her human friend, sees him standing there with crossed arms and an unimpressed expression. “You're not arguing with me,” she notices, feeling somewhat confused and bereft. “You look like you want to, but you're not.”
“If you think I'm going to let that Frost Giant jackass stay under the impression that he can best me in a battle, then think again,” Bingley replies with another offended sniff, then he fixes her with an imperial glare. “I'm just not sure that you're in any condition to go after him, either physically... or -” Bingley pauses for a moment, face screwing up awkwardly. “- emotionally.”
Darcy stares at him. “Are. You. Serious?”
Bingley glares back and coolly informs her, “Entirely serious. There is reason to believe that the weapon may have wreaked damage on your mental state as well as your physical, and by my conversation with your human -”
“Jane,” Jane stresses in only the way someone who's been repeatedly correcting someone can.
“- you were not in the most stable of emotional states immediately prior to that,” Bingley concludes, as though his point has just secured a flawless victory. “...'Angry people are not always wise'. I do not believe it would be wise for you confront the Frost Giant jackass again.”
Like hell.
“I thought you were dead, you jerk! How was I supposed to react? And over my dead body are you going to face him alone if he managed to stab you through the chest!”
“He caught me off-guard!”
“I don't care! That's not a good thing!”
“It will not be happening again!” Bingley snaps back, looking about a second away from actually stomping his foot. “You took a magical blast with unknown effects directly to the chest because you got angry and distracted! I barely understand what it did to your body! Who knows what it's done to your mind?!”
(“We have finally reached the beginning of the end.”)
Darcy blinks that strange, intrusive thought out of her head for the moment and snaps back, “My mind is fine, you hypocritical little lizard!”
She's got a fucking awful headache, but she can't sense any outside influence on her and she feels entirely like herself.
Her eyes fall on Jane then, and she corrects her previous statement. She feels mostly like herself.
Bingley scoffs something under his breath like, “I beg to differ.”
Darcy ignores him.
It's later now, and Darcy definitely feels guilty. She chose to let her friend die so she could try to avenge her brother, and in her rage, it had been so very easy. So absolutely thoughtless and careless and thoughtless, and just... angry. It almost felt like something else entirely had taken over her thoughts and her actions, but Darcy knows it had been her in control, all too real and present and conscious.
Her without any humans or humanity holding her back... the first her. The original her. The deadly thing that ripped people to shreds to protect herself and her clutch-brother, the vicious creature that devoured people to prevent starvation, the possessive monster that only had one family member left to lose and wasn't going to give him up to any Frost Giants or Asgardians or human beings. Not to war or famine or pestilence. She was then the childish little wyrm and the angry ancient thing, far older than Jane Foster and Darcy Lewis and human names and human faces and human lives. The first, original, real her that rarely comes out these days.
The part of her that recognized that Jane Foster was a fascination – a passing fancy – who would come and go soon enough. The part of her that recognized that Jane Foster was human and ultimately unimportant when it came to Infinity Stones and Jahandar and actual kin. The part of her that didn't care about friendship or protection or potential, and knew that although Jane was special and clever and adorable, she mattered only to Darcy Lewis, who would not last forever either.
In the eyes of the clutch-sister of Babakaltan, who had fought Frost Giants for him before and spent hundreds of years at his side, Jane Foster could die and there would be little loss. Her heart would break and she would mourn, but time would pass and humans were not meant to last. Babakaltan was the ultimate loss, the death that needed avenging, not Jane Foster.
And she made that choice, she realizes now as she looks at Jane with great and terrible images floating in the back of her head (space, broken rock, creatures, monsters). She chose to be Babakaltan's clutch-sister instead of Jane Foster's friend and hoarder, the dragon first and foremost.
So... what now?
She's still Darcy Lewis, she thinks. She still likes following Jane Foster around and listening to her talk about the stars, and cares about Erik and Culver and her iPod and how many Twitter followers she has. She'll argue stanchly in defense of Poli Sci and bad movies and human rights (despite not technically being human), and cry during movies and certain commercials, and tell horrible stories about her loser brother who hates his poetry prof. She likes pizza and baggy clothing and hipster fashions and lipstick, plus fantasy books and terrible puns and Austen movies.
None of those things were a lie. Those were all true. She's not one to pretend to like something or not to like something just to fit in, even if fitting in is kind of the point of a human life. Darcy Lewis is real, just as much as Darcy Bennet.
But then there's everything else that no one knew, that was quietly ignored or humming in the background of her human existence. She's still the dragon who cares if her clutch-brother is blowing himself up with magic, who still wonders about their siblings and kin and where they all went, who's terrified of Jahandar and looks at her hand sometimes thinking about stones and sisters. She's still the little dragonet, abandoned but adapting and surviving, who would kill anything before she let her clutch-brother be hurt. Who saw a war between gods and giants once upon a time, and hasn't ever gone back to or near that battlefield even hundreds of years later.
No one would really know this, but she doesn't pronounce Mjolnir's name wrong because she doesn't know it or can't say it, but as her own little private joke. Her clutch-brother might get it, since he was there when the Queen of Asgard crashed into their lives wielding it. Humanoid tongues and names are not easy things for little dragons who know only their native growls to grasp.
She called that hammer ridiculous butcherings long before Erik shoved a book in their faces, before it landed in Puente Antiguo, before Puente Antiguo or New Mexico existed. That was a little bit Darcy Lewis, but it was also a little bit of a blue dragonet who remembered the weapon that saved her.
Normally she'd say that she wasn't one for identity crises, but she might be having one now. She feels entirely like herself, but it's just... strange. She's entirely like herself, has been for awhile on this mad journey, and it's like she's just now coming to terms with it. Before, her human lives and underlying self have always stayed more or less separate, with their own separate business, but there's not even a line to cross anymore. No point in hiding. There's no balance of sides, just... there are no sides at all. There were never any sides really, but now it actually feels like it.
“I'm sorry,” she says to Jane.
Her clutch-brother – who might have been in middle of a rant, she wasn't really paying attention – swivels to look in bewilderment at the human beside him, then back at her clutch-sister in open confusion. But she ignores him and focuses on Jane – poor, wonderful, amazing Jane who just wanted to stare at the stars and know things.
“I'm sorry for dragging you into this mess, and for putting you in danger,” she continues. “You nearly died because of me, and I'm sorry.”
Jane looks absolutely stunned. Her eyes are wide and searching and her mouth is open, like she's trying to form words but can't and needs to look around wildly for an answer. Next to her, Bingley is singularly unhelpful, and has the most disgruntled what-the-fuck expression his clutch-sister had seen on him for awhile.
“Erm... I'm not gonna say it's okay,” Jane begins awkwardly after a while, “since everything has been very much not okay for the last bit and very terrifying. But... I don't hold anything against you? I don't blame you for any of this?” She bites her lip and looks around a bit more, obviously uncomfortable and not willing to meet enormous silver eyes. “I mean, I'd probably still be right in the middle of it without you.” Jane looks at Bingley then. “Both of you. And where would that put me right now?”
Honestly? All signs point to Jane probably being in a secure SHIELD facility somewhere if not for her, very much not in the middle of everything and not in life-threatening danger. Probably mostly if not entirely unaware of the situation and definitely not stabbed. Jane was on the helicarrier because of her, was brought to Loki's immediate attention because of a combination of her and Thor, and was really only held hostage because of her.
But Jane is an intelligent woman, and if that's how she wants to see things, alright.
Besides, as guilty as she feels, she's not going to blame herself entirely. She's just going to find the evil son of a snowflake who really put Jane in danger and rip him into pieces and then set the pieces on fire. It can be her extra, unspoken apology to Jane.
She looks at her clutch-brother next. “Thanks for saving Jane, Bing, and for saving me.”
Her clutch-brother stares at her, slowly turning pink, starting at his cheeks and quickly spreading to his ears and neck. “Are you sick?” he demands, trying to shove his hands deeper into his bloody hoodie pocket as though that'll protect him from feelings.
She has to laugh slightly at that, and oh, ow, it hurts to laugh. “No, I'm not sick,” she answers, taking a few deep breaths to try and settle the awful burning in her chest, which only aggravates through the uncomfortable pull of broken scales. “I'm just... saying stuff that needs to be said.”
“No, you aren't,” her clutch-brother immediately disagrees, still pink and refusing to meet her eyes.
She laughs again at that, silently, and heaves herself to her feet. The ground thumps satisfying under her feet and the heavy swing of her tail through the air is just as good. She stretches out her neck, raising her head to the sun, and unfolds her aching wings to feel some breeze through them. Umph, she hurts right now, so fucking badly, but near-death is something a little flying can probably metaphorically walk-off.
Down below, Jane looks supportive while her clutch-brother looks close to tearing his hair out.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW ?!” he nearly wails.
She studies their surroundings. It's a deserted field, with a few roads and buildings in various distances, which is probably more her clutch-brother's choice than just lucky landing. She can't tell how far the surge of the Tesseract's power is exactly, but it feels alarmingly close.
“I'm going to go kick some Frost Giant ass to stop him from taking over the world or destroying all life on Earth or something, duh,” she answers, swinging her snout around to look at him. “You can't stop me from going anywhere, Bing. I hurt like hell right now, but I kind of like this planet, and I owe him some fire to the chest.”
“And I owe him an actual hole in the chest,” her clutch-brother snaps back.
Darcy rolls her eyes at him. She'll admit that she's not in the best condition to fight Loki or whatever the hell he's concocted it, but that doesn't mean she's going to sit this one out to let this idiot lizard try to take care of things. “Then come along.”
Her clutch-brother's mouth closes, he blinks, and then says, “What?”
“If you're not letting me go by myself and I'm not letting you go by yourself, but neither of us is willing to stay behind, then...”
“No.”
“But we make a pretty great team.”
Bingley folds his arms over his chest. “...Fine,” he says snottily. “But I get priority because I'm better suited to fighting the Frost Giant jackass.”
“How the fuck did you decide that?”
“We're both magic-users, it only makes sense.”
“No, it doesn't.”
“Well, I'm coming too!” Jane says, throwing in her two cents.
Both dragons, one in human form and one not, turn to look disbelievingly at her.
“Hell, no,” Bingley says.
“Jane... that's kind of a terrible idea.”
Jane crosses her own arms over he chest and sticks out her chin. “Loki is trying to create a portal, right? That's why he took Erik, right? Do you have some other expert on Einstein-Rosen Bridges waiting in the wings?”
Both siblings stare at her.
“...Is that a pun?”
Jane frowns. “What? No, there's no... Why would there be...?” The human woman looks at up the massive violet wings before her. “Oh. Oh, no. NO!”
“Oh.”
“It will be equally dangerous as before if not more so,” Bingley says seriously.
Jane sticks out her chin again. “I know.”
Honestly? Well... Jane probably does know. She just got stabbed and thrown off a helicarrier, after all, and it's true that she's probably the best human expert on portals there is. Erik is a complete unknown, Thor is dead, and while it's pretty likely that Bingley can handle just about anything through his hoarding and some improvisation, Jane could be needed on this one. It would be pretty shitty to just leave Jane out in the middle of nowhere, and Jane can make her own choices about whether she wants to be involved in this mess.
It's just... Jane will also be an enormous liability. She's wonderful and adorable, but she has no self-preservation instinct sometimes. If things really go to shit, then one of them will need to keep a constant watch on her. They likely won't need both of them to kill Loki, but the Frost Giant is a tricky bastard and he won't hesitate to use Jane against her again.
She looks at her clutch-brother questioningly. Bingley looks equally considering. Her clutch-brother is an arrogant lizard, but he can (mood-depending) recognize that technology and science are not his strong-suit. Better safe than sorry, right?
Bingley sighs heavily and nods acceptance.
“I'm not going to let him hurt you again,” Darcy promises Jane.
Jane, so much smaller and so very human, looks up at her and smiles. “I know.”
Darcy has to look away before her heart melts or something, like her having another identity mini-crisis. She focuses her attention on her clutch-brother again. Her injuries don't leave her in much of a position for fighting Loki, so she'll protect Jane, leave Loki to her clutch-brother, and provide back-up where needed. This is starting to sound almost like a plan, if not for how they don't really know what they'll be flying into and it's far too simple to actually be called a plan.
“I'll fly us there,” Darcy says, shaking herself out, ignoring the pull and burn of her chest, and having some more broken scales drop onto the ground below her. “I'm faster and it'll save your strength for curb-stomping that Frost Giant jackass in a magical showdown.”
Bingley goes from being about to argue, to being slightly pissed off and offended, to being obviously pleased and a second away from preening. Then his grin gets a bit more toothful and a lot more wicked, his eyes gleaming dragon-like in his human form, like he plans on picking Loki out of his teeth later. As clever a trickster and magician Loki is, it'll be fun to see how he fares against a full-grown, fire-breathing golden-eyed dragon who's just had his only kin nearly killed and has his pride on the line besides.
It's almost one the classic blunders, really. To paraphrase, never go up against a dragon when pride and precious things are on the line.
Darcy, grinning a dragon smile back at her clutch-brother, lowers herself to the ground to allow Bingley and Jane to clamber onto her back. She can't help by wince as she does, the movement causing greater pain through the stretch and burn and scratch and ache of her chest and limbs. She's bruised and hurting and could probably do with several weeks sleep and some hours of gorging herself. If what happens next is anything like what's happened so far, she'll need months and days.
Bingley brings Jane forward with a surprising amount of gentleness, helping the human woman onto Darcy's outstretched wing and up onto her back. There's some wobbling, because walking on wing flesh isn't very steady business, but they help each other up and are soon holding onto the spines between her neck and her wings. Darcy pulls herself to her feet with a groan.
“...I can do something to numb the pain,” Bingley offers.
“Please, please do,” Darcy groans as she spreads her wings. “Can you do it midair?”
He scoffs. “Of course.”
“Then do it as we're on the way to... Wait, where exactly are we going?” Darcy has just now remembered that she never actually caught where the tracking program found the Tesseract. She can easily follow the blaring power of the Tesseract, but that doesn't mean she knows where she'll be following it to. It might not mean much, but it can't hurt to know.
“New York,” Bingley answers from her back.
Darcy pauses, knees bent in preparation to take off into the air. “What?”
“What? ” says Jane.
“You lived there long enough for me to remember what that place looks like from the air,” Bingley says grumpily, with another offended sniff. “It's on that overly crowded island in the middle of it all. Hat town, or something.”
“You mean... Manhattan?” Jane demands, slightly shrill.
“Sure. That place.”
Darcy groans. “Holy fuck, Bing.”
“What?”