Work Text:
In the end, it ends quickly.
They are somewhere, she isn't quite sure where anymore, some wrecked and breaking place which used to be home to many people and many tall buildings. Darcy can see remains of both the people and the buildings from where she crouches, clinging to a miraculously whole slab of ragged concrete tilted at a precarious angle high above a newborn canyon of wreckage. She had agreed to let Loki leave her there, because the slippery perch offers an excellent view of the battle cresting in the canyon.
Or perhaps it is many battles; Darcy can't really tell. There are certainly many participants (though she thinks by now less than half of the number who began the fighting) and more blinding shocks of light, more bone-numbing crashes and more screams than Darcy can keep track of. Most of those don't matter though, they're like the sad sideshow bands at some music festival she had gone to before anything was really important.
Because, at least for Darcy, there is only one battle. It's not the loudest fight, not the one in the center of the canyon (which is slowly disintegrating under the force of the fighting into an amphitheater of destruction almost wider than she can see). It's the one to the side, the fight that, from Darcy's viewpoint, looks like the diagram of an atom in a textbook she had once flipped through before a final exam.
Except this time, Darcy knows every particle in that sphere of crazy power.
She can see the red blur of Tony Stark in his stupid suit, still brilliant even through the dusty billows of microscopic rubble and strange light from the struggling sun. She can see the static green mass that must be Banner, hurling huge projectiles into the heart of the chaos. Darcy squints through her grimy glasses and watches the blue form of Rogers-what's-his-name, bouncing crazily off of the wreckage, kicking and looking like a particularly energetic dipshit; Agent Romanoff is more graceful, thin and leaping in a deadly blur, but even she can't seem to land a blow.
And there's Thor, of course there's Thor, his red cape a constant scarlet streak, his armor darkened but still somehow shining... and for the first time since this last day began, Darcy's throat becomes painfully tight. "Why did you not return from Loki's prison?" It's a bewildered echo, sweet and stupid, and so... so... "I waited for hours, and when you did not emerge..."
Darcy shakes her head, hard, gulping through the sudden coldness in her gut. "I chose," she tells herself, and it's a little bit of a lie but she doesn't regret it. She doesn't wish she were on the other side of the widening arena, and she definitely doesn't want to be somewhere dark and safe--or safe and dead--with Jane. She blinks away the stupid burning in her eyes and forces her attention on the nucleus of their collective destruction.
*
He is really fucking amazing, even from this distance. He is dark and pale at once, a slim form in silver and black, and the blurs of antagonistic color which swirl around him somehow seem dull and lifeless as she watches him spin spells out of nothing. Pockets of void bloom into being around him, limned by fantastic shocks of violet light; Darcy doesn't know what they're for, but the heavy green satelite of the Hulk collides with one and the resulting explosion leaves her blinking slathered magenta streaks from her vision for much longer than is comfortable. Darcy watches him take out Rodgers too, though that happens too quickly for her to see, and she bites her lip as Thor swells with the pain of a thousand awful things which are almost, maybe, absolutely her fault.
Darcy's vision blurs now, but she hears Loki's laughter crackle across the canyon.
*
And then there's a lurch, a sliding sensation, but it feels less like falling and more like shifting from a fighter's stance to fetal position. Darcy has experience with that kind of shifting, at least on the inside, and she knows what it means without quite allowing the maginified implications to strike home. Her stomach roils but there's nothing left, and her fingers seize the concrete slab with a stubbornness she has always considered one of her finest attributes.
The battle of the atom pauses like someone's stepped on the molecular remote, and she sees him turn toward her, frazzled strings of magic sizzling beautifully around him, and then Darcy is falling.
*
She knows when she has stopped even though she doesn't feel it, and didn't think she would. She's glad about that, even if the tiny ironic part of her who slept through biology and chewed through medical dramas like cracked-up brownies observes that that's probably a really bad thing. Her brain isn't mush, though, and one of her lungs must still be working at least little bit, because Darcy--whatever really makes her Darcy, anyway--is definitely still here.
There doesn't seem to be any sound left in the world, though, at least not that Darcy can hear. She also can't see at all, but whether that's because the sun is finally gone and there's nothing left to see, or if seeing is just something she can't do anymore, Darcy doesn't know.
She does know when he gets to her, though, in a light pressure somewhere that might be her arm, from a hand she knows very, very well. There's a soft, steady pulse of air somewhere above that, by her ear, maybe, but Darcy also knows that Loki isn't saying anything. She tries to smile because that's something she really wants to do, but she has no way of knowing if she's gotten it right. The memory of his own sharp, slashing smile flashes suddenly through her, and she hopes.
And now there's nothing for it, because there is no way she's getting any stronger than this and something primal is telling her to hurry the hell up. So Darcy sucks in whatever air she can into whatever is left and pushes out what she hopes are really words through herself and into the dying universe.
I knew about the door. I knew I could go. I knew, but I stayed.
It's a lie, and he probably knows it. Still, she thinks it's a good one.
There's a trembling vibration just above her, almost like an of echo the humming she felt as she imagined the words, and Darcy Lewis is sure that Loki agrees.