#i imagine that the first time someone jokingly flirts with darcy he kind of looms and his teeth seem extra sharp

[amusewithaview]

reelin’ with the feelin’ (darcy/namor)

For @phoenix-173.

When Darcy was seven, she spent a summer on her bio-dad’s houseboat in the Florida Keys.  The first thing out of her mouth when her mothers picked her up afterwards was, “I fell in the water and drowned for a while and it was awesome!”  She did not spend any more summers with her bio-dad.  Darcy wasn’t given to exaggeration or hyperbole, which is why her mothers demanded an accounting of the incident from Jack.  His response, “She was swimming for a while and I napped, she was fine,” was enough to change the visitation rules.  From Darcy’s 8th birthday on, they stuck to more easily regulated holidays, the ones he spent in the city and not on the sea.

She found other ways to the ocean.  By hook or by crook, the waters were a part of her now because the thing of it was, Darcy hadn’t been exaggerating.

She did fall.

She did drown.

She just didn’t stay drowned.

There was a boy in the water.  Darcy waved to him.  He tilted his head, so she knew he’d seen her, but he didn’t wave back.  She scooted on her tummy so that most of her torso was hanging off the edge of the boat, trying to get a better view.  He wasn’t kicking his legs or moving his arms, he was just hanging there in the water, a few feet below the surface.

“Are you okay?” she asked, slowly and exaggeratedly.

He frowned at her.

“Are you okay?” she asked again, trying to use her arms to gesture and make her words clearer to the boy in the water.  That was her downfall.  Literally.  She barely had time for her eyes to widen before she was tipping into the water, face first.

She flailed, arms and legs kicking, but all that did was level her out a little.  Her momentum had pushed her a few feet below the surface and her clothes weighed her down more than her thrashing could buoy her up.  She twisted and turned awkwardly in the water, her hair tangling around her head and neck till she could not tell up from down or left from right.  Her lungs were hurting, her eyes burned from the salt and there was water in her nose.

Darcy opened her mouth -

A hand covered her lips, trapping the air about to escape.  Another hand grasped her shoulder, holding firmly, a silent admonishment to stay still.  Darcy froze, trembling and desperately trying to keep what little air she had left in her lungs.  The hand left her shoulder and carefully pulled her hair away from her eyes, pushing it to drift behind her.

She hurt, she couldn’t focus, her chest was aching, she started to move and the hand over her mouth was suddenly gone - replaced by lips.  Darcy stared at the boy as air was forced into her lungs straight from his.  She gasped as she breathed deep, then something thicker than air was passing between them, something colder than ice that seemed to fill up her lungs, her chest, breaking out from between her ribs and expanding until it pushed against her skin all over.

The boy took his mouth from hers, grabbed her wrists and pulled her deeper under the water.

Darcy kicked and fought, holding onto that last breath he’d given her until her vision started to go blurry at the edges.  She opened her mouth for a scream and water flooded in, down her throat and then through it.

The boy waited for her eyes to meet his before he smiled.

Darcy, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the last few minutes, frowned at him and said: “I don’t think I like you.”

...

In London, Jane watched Darcy watch the water with the same kind of naked longing that she knew she wore when she looked at the stars.  “You could go swimming if you wanted,” she said.  “I mean, it’s cold, but don’t they make suits for that kind of thing?”

“Nah,” Darcy said, shrugging and very deliberately turning her back on the ocean.  “I don’t like to swim in public.”  She gestured to her chest and made a face, “The structural capacity of most suits isn’t really enough to contain my personal flotation devices.”

“Oh,” Jane said.  “You could wear a t-shirt?”

“Not the same, but thanks anyways.”

...

She was standing waist-deep in the water, skimming her fingers along the flat surface.  There was a glint of gold flirting with the edge of her vision about ten feet further into the depths, just past where the sandbar ended.

Darcy rolled her eyes at the obvious ploy.  “Not happening,” she murmured, deliberately turning her back on the glint in the water and the sun, still hanging low in the sky.  Sunrise was past, the world was waking up, and she could only steal another half hour before she would have to head back.

Time and tide wait for no man, she thought to herself.  There was a faint, deliberate splashing sound behind her.  Except him, she corrected herself with a slight smile.

“What keeps you?” he demanded.

“It’s called a job, Namor.”

“You have a job,” he reminded her, coming to stand close enough she could feel the faint heat emanating from his skin.  She leaned back a little so she was resting against him, the top of her head was level with his shoulder, kind of.

“I’m not ready to be any kind of queen or wife,” Darcy said, wrinkling her nose at the thought.  “I’m seventeen.”

Namor grumbled, but didn’t truly object.  “We do not have to wed for you to stay,” he said reluctantly.  “But come.  You take pieces of me with you where you go.”

Darcy grabbed at one of his hands and pulled it up so it rested flat over the top of her ribcage, cupping her heart.  His hand was large enough that the heel rested over her breast, but she ignored that.  “You could take it back,” she offered.  “You were still pretty young-”

“No,” he said, so firmly and so quickly that she dropped it.  She let him turn her around so they faced the depths and the sun and together they watched it fill the sky and glimmer off the waves until she absolutely, unequivocally, had to go.

“Next weekend,” she offered.  “I’ll have to call and check in once or twice, but I can come out longer.”

“Someday I will not be satisfied with the dregs of your time,” Namor said, and it was as much an acceptance of her offer as it was a warning.

...

“Why were you there, in the water under the docks, that day?”

“There was a current where no current should be.  I was curious.”

“A mystery?”

“I would call it ‘guidance.’”

...

After the elves but before New York, Darcy walked out into the waters of the North Atlantic sea and she let them swallow her whole.  She did not fight when the water pulled her down, down, deep and far and fast.  She let the cold ocean cradle her, shut her eyes and napped until she was woken by a much warmer, angrier embrace.

“Are you done?” he asked.  “Will you come?”

“There are people who love me up there-”

Namor scowled, dark eyes seeming almost to glow.  “There are people who love you down here,” he pointed out through grit teeth.

Darcy looked at him and she hurt, for herself and for him.  But the truth was the truth, and it was this: “I can’t leave it all behind.”

“I cannot live in two places at once,” he said, pressing one hand over her heart.

“What does that-” mean for us, she wanted to say.  “What do we do?” she asked instead.

He said nothing.

...

There was a moment, in New Mexico, where Darcy thought, If I die, he will tear this world in half to find the killers.

Well.

Better not die, then.

...

Darcy was not in New York when the man came out of the water.  Darcy was on Asgard, with Jane, for the first and (she hoped) the last time.  She’d now seen an ocean of stars, light drifting across land like waves lapping at the shore.  She preferred an actual ocean: salt and sand and teeming with life.

She’d barely stepped off the Bifrost imprint before she was in his arms.  “Namor?” she said, confused but still hugging him.  He was dry, he was inside, she had absolutely no idea what was going on, but he was here.

“The merman said he was looking for his wife,” Tony drawled.  “Wasn’t expecting that to be you, Lewis.”

“Technically I think we’re betrothed,” she said faintly, still staring at Namor.  “Did something happen?”

He shrugged.  “I will not be without you anymore.”

“I can’t just leave-”

“Then I will stay, for now.”

“But you have to-”

“And you can come with me.  I believe you call it a ‘compromise.’”

Darcy stared at him for a moment.  For a man who could embody the endlessly shifting ocean, he looked utterly implacable.  “Okay,” she said.  “Okay, we’ll make it work.”