#michael wants his daughters to be geniuses and he fully intends on starting early

[michaelectras]

adam’s bedtime stories of choice for baby:

how do dinosaurs say goodnight

guess how much i love you

the little engine that could

michael’s bedtime stories of choice for baby:

the brothers karamazov

finnegans wake

the sound and the fury

[freudensteins-monster]

There’s Something About Darcy

Found this in my DEAD folder. Apparently I was planning on doing more to it but giving it a read through now (two and a half years after it was started) it seems like a decent enough one shot. According to my notes it was inspired by THIS POST.

There’s something familiar about Darcy Lewis. It takes a while for it to register with Tony at first because no sooner had they been introduced than he attempted to prove himself more knowledgeable in the field of astrophysics than Thor’s girlfriend. Tony maintains that it was a draw, no matter what Foster says.

It isn’t until a few days later, after Foster and Co are settled in, that he really notices her. He finds his way to Foster’s lab in the hopes of arguing with her further over one of her published papers (his own work was going nowhere fast and he was in want of a distraction) but finds it empty save for Darcy. She’s kneeling on a stool, the innards of one of Jane’s machines laid out on the lab table in front of her.

“What the hell did you do, kid? Foster’s going to kill you for messing with her babies,” Tony warns though his tone is light, full of his usual wry amusement. He thinks about helping the intern (he’d completely forgotten her name) put them back together but the thought of throwing the heaping piles of scrap metal out and replacing them with shiny new ones to piss Foster off even more held him back.

“Relax bossman, I’m fixing it,” Darcy assures him without bothering to look up from motherboard she’s inspecting.

“And when exactly did you become an astrophysicist?” Tony demands to know, peering over her shoulder.

“Not until I graduate next year, but I’m pretty sure my computer engineering degree will do for now.”

“Computer engineering? I thought you majored in the soft sciences?”

“Yeah, at 20. But I got my computer engineering degree from MIT at 17. You actually gave my commencement speech,” she adds, offering him the smallest of smirks as she stares at him over the top of her glasses.

It’s that look, that barely there smirk, that sends Tony’s mind spiralling. Tony’s seen that look in hundreds photos and videos and various reflective surfaces. He knows that look. He’s pretty sure Pepper hates that look. Tony has to remind himself to breathe. He leaves Darcy to her work and rushes back to his lab under the guise of getting back to his own, but instead he has JARVIS pull up everything he can find about Darcy Maria Lewis.

Maria? Really? Tony groans, feeling the colour drain from his face. What kind of woman would have his kid and never tell him about it but still give her his mother’s name?

He looks up Elizabeth Anne Lewis (nee Benson) next and tries to answer that question. For the life of him he can’t remember her, but that does little to reassure him. He and JARVIS spend the night looking into the Lewis women – they’re both incredibly smart and accomplished, and Tony would be pretty damn proud to have Darcy for a daughter, once he got over the shock of it - but when Pepper comes to drag him to bed several hours later he’s still got no proof to support his theory. For all appearances Darcy Lewis is the daughter of Michael and Elizabeth Lewis. Tony really wants to believe that, wants to believe that they were/are happily married and that he didn’t sleep with an older, married woman and father her illegitimate child.

Ugh. It’s enough to make him want to take up drinking heavily again. He quickly throws all his research in his virtual trash can and follows Pepper to bed, blaming the minor obsession on lack of sleep.

He tries to forget about it, he really does, but every time he sees Darcy he can’t help but see bits of himself in her; brown hair, brown eyes, smart as a whip, never-ending sass, and that goddamn smirk. He has JARVIS triple check his credit card statements and travel itinerary against Darcy’s mother’s but the results are the same.

He keeps his crazy theories to himself until Cap’s birthday blowout. That night he witnesses Darcy drink Barton under the table and then proceed to put together a fully customised iPod (after Thor accidently stepped on hers) until she passed out on the finished product.

“Tony, what’s wrong?” Pepper asks in the early hours of the morning after rolling over to find Tony sitting up in bed, a haunted expression on his face. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“Darcy Lewis is my kid,” he mumbles.

“That’s a weird nightmare,” Pepper replies drowsily.

“No, Pep. I think Lewis might actually be my kid.”

“What? Why?”

“Look at this!” he snaps, waving the Darcy’s iPod in front of Pepper’s face. “She made this from scratch after doing shots of Asgardian mead. Who else could do that?”

“Tony, alcoholism and a knack for electronics aren’t exactly hereditary traits.”

“I know, but…” Tony sighs irritably.

“But what?”

“She’s got my smile, Pepper,” he says, his own lip twitching as an example. “She’s got my eyes, my smarts, my sense of humour… my taste in music,” he adds in frustration, throwing Darcy’s iPod onto the bed. “Her middle name’s Maria, for Christ’s sake.”

“It’s just a coincidence, Tony,” Pepper tries to assure him as she rubs slow circles over his back.

“That’s a hell of a lot of coincidences,” Tony mutters, but he leans into Pepper’s touch, eventually lying down next to her and drifting off to sleep.

 A few days later Pepper is making her way to Tony’s after a meeting, an espresso from the communal kitchen in hand, when she spies Darcy sitting at her desk in Jane Foster’s lab. She fully intends walk straight past but Tony’s crazy theory is still keeping him, and her, up at night so Pepper decides to talk to the girl and perhaps come away able to poke a few more holes in Tony’s theory.

“Hello Darcy,” Pepper beams startling the girl.

“Ms Potts! Um, hi!” Darcy babbles nervously, almost knocking over her own identical cup of coffee. “What are you doing here? I mean, I’m sure you can go anywhere you want, but did you want something? I will totally give you whatever you want.”

“I just wanted to stop by and say hello, and see how you fared after Tony’s party. I hear you over indulged in some Asgardian mead,” Pepper teases.

“Ugh,” Darcy groans. “I swear I’m never drinking that stuff again. I totally lost a day. I mean it, I have no idea where the fifth of July went.”

“I’m sure JARVIS could help you figure that out, if you wanted him to.”

“Oh, no, I think I’m better off not knowing.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better now,” Pepper smiles. She turns to leave but hesitates when another topic of conversation occurs to her. “Did Tony return your iPod? I remember seeing him toying with it the other day and I told him to give it back to you…”

“Yeah, he did. He left it on my desk for me to find.”

“And he didn’t try and improve it or make it sentient or something, did he?”

“Nah. It’s fine. Though I don’t remember ever owning quite that many Black Sabbath songs,” Darcy smiles, that barely there smirk, and once Pepper sees it she can’t unsee it.

“Oh my god…”

“What?” Darcy startles.

“I… I think I stepped in gum,” Pepper replies, cringing at her lame lie, not that Darcy’s noticed.

“Oh no, not your Louboutin’s!” Darcy cries, leaning down to check Pepper’s heels for her. Pepper sets down her coffee cup and leans on the desk as she lifts one foot and then the other. “No… they look okay.”

“Oh… good,” Pepper mumbles, picking up a decidedly lighter coffee cup as she straightens up. “Maybe it was just a sticky bit of floor.”

“Probably,” Darcy nods in agreement.

“Well… I should be going… and make sure Tony hasn’t blown anything up,” she adds weakly, spinning on her perfectly clean heels, hoping against hope that if Darcy notices the switch that she doesn’t chase after her.

 “Tony!” Pepper all but shouts as she bursts into his lab. “Tony, you need to test this,” she says, holding out the coffee cup like she was offering him communion wine.

“Did Natasha switch the coffee out with decaf again?” he teases.

“It’s Darcy’s.”

“Darcy doesn’t drink decaf. Wow, awesome alliteration,” he marvels.

“No, it’s her cup, her DNA. You need to test it.”

Tony freezes then glances from Pepper to the cup and back again.

“I saw her smile,” Pepper shrugs as way of an explanation. “I hate that smile.”

 Even with his top of the line private lab the DNA results still take the better part of a day to come back. JARVIS makes sure the results are for Tony’s eyes only, but he waits until Pepper’s by his side before he looks at them. His eyes flick over the DNA comparison, Pepper squeezing his free hand, and what he sees confuses him. It’s not what he thought and it takes him a second to understand what he’s seeing.

“Sonofabitch.”

 Darcy is ensconced in her Stark Tower room catching up on the astronomy reading Jane assigned her when there’s a knock at the door. To say she’s surprised to find Tony Stark on the other side of it is an understatement. When he wasn’t straight up ignoring her he was just plain weird and Darcy didn’t know what to make of it, but she filed it away as pretty standard as far as her interactions with eccentric geniuses went.

“Darcy,” Tony greets with a small nod as he fidgets nervously in her doorway.

“Hi…” Darcy replies warily. Tony’s never addressed her by her name before and she has to wonder why he’s starting now. “What’s up?”

“Can I come in?” he asks, gesturing at her couch with the tablet in his hands.

“Uh, sure. Can I get you something to drink?” she replies automatically.

“No, no, it’s fine. You might want one though after I’ve said my piece,” he adds morosely.

“Am I getting fired? Wait, you can’t do that, you’re not my boss. Am I getting kicked out?!” she demands shrilly.

“No, Lewis. Jeez, just sit down, would you?”

Darcy drops onto opposite end of the couch to Tony and regards him silently, waiting for whatever horrible news he has to tell her.

“What do you know about your grandfather?”

“Whhhhyyy do you want to know about Papa Lewis?”

“No, not that one. Your other one. Your mother’s father. Did she ever tell you about him?”

“She didn’t know him,” Darcy answers slowly, humouring the troubled looking billionaire across from her. “All my nana would ever say about him was that he was a sleazy sonofabitch and I’d do well to avoid men like him.” The silence stretches on so Darcy tries to think of something else to fill it. “She mentioned once, after a few glasses of wine, that the sonofabitch was rich and that he’d paid for her first house, even if he didn’t know it.” When Tony still remains quiet Darcy loses her patience. “Seriously, dude. You’re weirding me out. What does my absent douchebag of a grandfather have to do with anything?"

Tony offers her a sympathetic smile as he starts playing around on his tablet.

“There was something about you,” he begins. “When I met you I just felt like you were sort of familiar, and the more I learnt about you the more convinced I was that we were related,” he says passing over the tablet. “I was right. Sort of.”

Darcy’s mind reels as she scans the DNA results.

“Wait… where did you… Pepper,” she sighs. “You got Pepper to steal my coffee cup.”

“No, Pep did that on her own. After talking with you she saw what I saw and wanted to get to the bottom of it. Can’t tell you if we’re happy that you’re not my kid or not, but I suppose niece is still pretty awesome.”

Darcy gawks at Tony’s all too familiar smirk and then back down at the DNA results.

“Sonofabitch.”