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5.
False prophets are a dime a dozen in Los Angeles - the City of Angels anything but - and Bucky's fifty dollars has bought him an hour with Darcy Lewis in her sparsely decorated apartment. There is no crystal ball, no lamps covered in coloured chiffon or deities gracing her walls, just a few pieces of cheap looking furniture and a few framed concert posters on the wall, Bob Dylan next to the small television near the sliding door to her balcony.
He feels odd when she clasps at his wrist, her thumb ghosting over the pulse point there like she's a nurse trying to to calculate his resting heart rate. Bucky doesn't like the way she looks at him, like she's busy peeling his skin away. He can tell that something is off about her, her answers too specific and filled with detail that puts him on edge.
In this line of work, you meet a lot of people who claim to be able to see the future. All of ‘em are hustlers who are too slow with their hands to steal the conventional way. Instead, they dress up their mediocrity with apartments covered in star charts and a lot of vague answer that can cover every eventuality.
The things she is saying… they’re not the vague answers he’s used to. She knows about the low-rise in Brooklyn, about him finding Rebecca’s body, about that fucking trench near Gizab with Steve (though she doesn’t give any details of that one beyond something about his friend’s hands, and Bucky says a quiet prayer of thanks to the universe for that). It takes him a while to realize she’s barely said a damn word about his future, only about his past.
You're full of bullshit, sweetheart, he lies, leaning back against her couch. His hands are shaking, so he taps them against the thick bone of his kneecap through his jeans.
Darcy arches an eyebrow. No refunds, she says with a smile. I knew you weren't here for the reading anyway, so you might as well tell me what you are here for. She takes a sip of the beer she’s been nursing throughout her reading. Maybe some amulets for your night job.
His jaw sets and he can feel the corners of his mouth curve down, something she clearly enjoys from the look on her face. You're not exactly subtle, buddy. I knew who you were when you walked through the door. So just ask already, the foreplay is getting tiresome.
The universe didn’t tell you why I was here?
You’re not that important to the universe, she answers flatly, pausing before she finishes with a sarcastic, babe.
The grin that takes his face is genuine for the first time in ages.
She gives him the seventy vials of the silver extract and the same amulet the body of the dead hunter in the Hills had been wearing, the one he’d taken her business card from.
Bucky tosses another twenty on the coffee table, walking around it to her front door. Tip, he explains when she shoots him a questioning look, her bill already paid in full, tucked into the small butterscotch tin above her microwave when she thought he wasn't looking.
This line of work is going to get you killed, she says quietly as he reaches for her doorknob, and Bucky knows instantly and bone deep that this is one of the few prophecies that Darcy Lewis pronounces that will come to pass.
1.
Darcy is born on the Blood Moon.
Bucky is born on a night with no moon at all.
2.
Darcy is six years old. Her family lives twenty minutes outside of Phoenix in a two-story house with a roof that looks purple when the sun hits it the right way.
Her next door neighbour is a quiet man with a friendly smile. Her mother calls him Mr. Horawitz, but he tells Darcy to call him Glenn (something her mother immediately tells her to ignore; it's rude, she says). He drives a red station wagon and has a golden retriever named Sammy that always ends up sliding under their fence and running through her mother's flowerbeds. Darcy likes him and his mailbox shaped like a duck, and on hot days, her mother lets her and her older sister go over and swim in the pool he has in his backyard.
The first time Darcy touches his hand, she hears crying. Disembodied crying, just the sound of it, thick and wet with blood. When she starts crying herself, scared, Mr. Horawitz reaches for her, his voice quiet as he asks her what's wrong, and the rest of it starts flooding in, the screams and the sharp slide of metal, nothing to see except for the dark pit of black at the back of her mind.
She doesn't go back to use his pool again.
Six months later, Darcy wakes up to bright flashing lights snapping against her walls. The police cars outside her window are parked around Mr. Horawitz's house, their sirens off, but the red and blue lights on top of their cars whirling frantically. Annie wakes up too, and they watch the men in uniforms filing in and out of the house, stretching yellow police tape across the lawn.
(They come to arrest him. They don't find any of the bodies, only his, hung from a pipe in his basement. Darcy is too young to understand any of it. All she knows is that a mean looking couple moves into the house four months later and drains the pool.)
13.
She's already half asleep when the knock comes at her door. The alarm clock beside her bed bleeds a fluorescent red 3:31 into the dark of her room, and Darcy lets her eyes slip shut again, willing whatever drunk asshole is at her door to go away, to pass out in the stairway in a puddle of vomit like most of them do. But the knocks at the door keep coming, growing louder and more persistent until she throws off her sheets and stomps out to the front door, livid.
The glass on the outside of the peephole is smudged, but Darcy can clearly see who is on the other side of her door, his jacket loose on his shoulders, the crisp shirt underneath peeled apart enough to see a swath of skin under his throat. He stares directly at the peephole as if he knows she's already there, already watching him.
Darcy swings open the door and leans into the frame with her hip. It's only when her bare thigh connects with the metal of the hinge that she remembers she's not wearing pants, only the ratty Springsteen t-shirt she picked up at a second hand store in Culver City and a pair of boycut panties that have seen better days. She crosses her arms over her chest and scowls. It's three in the fucking morning, asshole. Do you fucking mind?
Bucky's mouth twitches into a fleeting smile. He doesn't answer, his eyes flickering down her body like he's taking her in, the normal bullshit he pulls when he's had a bit too much to drink and he comes crawling to her door to get fucked, but there's something different this time, something more predatory than his usual assessment. His eyes linger too long in places: on her thighs, on the curve of her breast and neck.
You gonna invite me in? Bucky asks, and Darcy feels her frustration starting to bubble, her concern wiped away by the blistering irritation at the presumptuous tone of his voice, the total lack of acknowledgement of her anger and his lack of consideration.
(It's this moment that Darcy will think of later, the teasing nature of his words misconstrued as a come on, rather than pressing her to figure it out, to connect the dots in her mind. That will scare her more than anything - that he wanted her to know before she invited him in, that he was confident she would regardless.)
Were you expecting an engraved invitation? She shoots him an incredulous look, leaning back against the open door as if to usher him in with her body. He's usually this way when he comes to her door with some godawful injury that needs to be stitched closed, some sort of strange inability to simply ask for help, instead waiting for her to offer it up freely because he knows she will. Get in here. Don't bleed on my goddamn rug.
He smiles at her, but it's cold, just the sides of his mouth pulled taut.
It's only when Bucky brushes past her, the skin of his arm cool as it connects with the rosy warmth of hers, that she understands what she has done. She can see it as he moves through her apartment, gliding through the space with a carelessness that feels nothing like him. It's in the back of her mind, like she's pulling out one of her own memories instead of one of his. Blood. Death. The pain of turning, so rich and vibrant that she aches with it secondhand.
When she turns to him, there's acknowledgment on his face, like the vision she just had was in surround sound, that it was something he was privy to as well.
You really are a shitty psychic, Darcy, he says, and the smile from earlier is gone. Only teeth remain, sharp and threatening. You didn't see this coming?
3.
Bucky is nothing like Rebecca.
It's the first thing anyone says when they meet the Barnes twins, born to a school teacher and an architect in Brooklyn. Their mother takes to calling them sun and moon, polar opposites even though they spent months together in the womb, born moments apart, inseparable since.
Bucky's hair is dark where Rebecca’s is almost blonde. Blue eyes to lush green. Bulky to delicately thin. Stubborn to agreeable. Charmingly bold to shy.
Rebecca wants to be a veterinarian while Bucky wants to be an architect, like their father. Rebecca will never be a vet and Bucky will never be an architect, and neither of them will live long enough to carry on the Barnes name.
Rebecca dies at sixteen. Bucky dies at thirty-one.
The only similarity between the two is how they die.
(Only one wakes up after. Polar opposites even after the end.)
4.
The card is half-soaked with blood from the dead hunter. Bucky keeps it in his wallet anyway, tucked between the photo of his twin sister taken when she was fifteen and a photo of Steve and Bucky sitting in a Humvee northeast of Kandahar.
Darcy Lewis
~ Fortune Telling, Palm Reading, Lucky Numbers ~
(818) 555-2821 [email protected]
14.
He waits for her to speak, some cleverly disparaging remark dripping in disdain, but she's silent, her eyes flickering between him and the door. They both know he could reach the door first in every eventuality. He doesn't expect her to plead for her life, to beg him to leave her in peace. She doesn't disappoint. Darcy's never been the begging type.
You don't seem surprised, Miss Lewis, he says flippantly. His lips press taut over his sharp teeth in a cruel smile.
She doesn't move when he closes in, towering over her. There's still blood on his sleeve from earlier in the evening, a gangbanger he bled dry in the west end, and he watches her eyes shift to it for a second before returning to the stretch of beige wall behind him. I think we both saw this one coming, she replies brusquely, but there's something layered under the sound, and if he didn't know any better, he'd say it was sorrow. There's sadness, but shockingly no fear. It's only then that he realizes she doesn't seem scared at all, only cautious.
When she steps back, he follows the shadow of her footsteps, keeping their distance equal until she stops moving. There’s nowhere to go, and he wants her to know it.
(Somewhere, in the back of his mind, there’s a part of himself still left that is horrified, that never - ever - found satisfaction from the fear of a woman. It feels sour, like the last of it is rotting inside of him, overwhelmed by the anger that has finally been unleashed.)
Darcy puts her hand over his heart, the muscle that has gone still. The rest of his body feels surprisingly numb, but there's an aching in his chest, like his his heart has yet to fully die, like it's still struggling in vain to beat.
I'm going to miss that, she says, looking him square in the eye, not sad this time, instead bluntly defiant.
Her eyes widen in shock when his hand catches around her throat, her body bouncing against the wall before he closes in, his own body blurring round the edges in a way that makes him feel like he's vibrating. Movement feels different in death than in life, less of an exertion. A yard of space is eaten in a second, cumbersome weight suddenly light as a feather. Nothing feels of consequence.
Bucky only lets his nose linger over her pulse for a second, a reverent breath (only there's no air filling his lungs, no oxygen being spread through his body, just the smell of her in his mouth) before he lets his teeth devour her.
6.
He comes back three weeks after his first visit, standing at her door with an order for yarrow and yellow belladonna.
Mmm, Darcy says as Bucky takes a seat on her couch, watching her sort through the drawers of small labelled baggies. She charges him half the normal running rate for the items. Need the repeat business, she explains as he hands over a wad of bills, counting them out like she doesn't quite trust him even though she's just finished giving him a steep discount. It's only as she counts the last bill that he notices how she's handling them, her thumb running over the edges reverently, like she's searching for something hidden in the paper.
Holding up a drug dealer is never a good idea, Bucky, she says, her hip cocked to the side, her eyes bright with mischief. She tucks the ill-gotten money in her back pocket before she hands over the baggies.
The third time he comes back, only a week later, she has something for him free of charge.
There's a nest in Walnut Park. Off of Olive Street. The house with the red shutters. She's sitting at her small, round kitchen table, an ashtray in front of her filled with cigarette butts and ash, but he's pretty sure she doesn't smoke. He wonders who has been smoking in her apartment, who she lets sit across from her, plunk down their money to get answers for things they can’t change. Just a small nest, but they're strong. There’s a new player in town who’s been breeding them stronger.
Darcy shrugs when his eyes narrow in suspicion. You're not the only hunter who comes calling. The truth is that their crafts are siblings in the war thriving in the seedy supernatural underworld, the struggle between those who exercise power and those who try to contain it. Soothsayers are regarded as a neutral class, straddling the divide between, only targets when they choose to be. Although it's clear Darcy isn't exactly a psychic, she's definitely not totally without power, and Bucky knows she has given aid to hunters before.
How do you know whoever it is hasn't already cleared it out?
He's dead, she says plainly, reaching for the bottle of beer in front of her. The label is soaked with the sweat from the bottle and Darcy peels it off slowly, picking and tearing at the soggy paper. You lot don't have a long shelf life in LA.
Bucky can tell that her words aren't meant to be cruel. The simple truth is that no one has a long shelf life in LA; it is a city that feeds on itself, churns through the steady stream of fresh souls that crosses into its limits. After Steve, he couldn’t stay in New York, and Los Angeles felt like it was as far away as he could get without crossing an ocean.
(Even though he can feel it, feel Steve in the heat between the palm trees, his smell laced in the Santa Ana winds. He knew the moment Steve had followed him from the east coast.)
When he gets up to leave, she tosses him a pendant on a black cord. Free of charge. Wear it. There's an intricate carving on the silver pendant, three circles around an infinity symbol surrounded by what looks like Latin script. The metal feels unnaturally warm in his palm, but he finds himself throwing the cord over his head.
No reading this time? she asks cheekily, like a dare.
You see my future in your tea leaves today?
Darcy smiles cryptically, an almost affectionate look on her face. You'll be back.
7.
Bucky's a careful hunter. There are hunters with death wishes, hunters that choose their trade as a prolonged method of suicide, unable to make the final choice so instead picking a roundabout route, a more honourable end. This is not Bucky. He has no desire to meet death, not on the shitty streets of Los Angeles and not at the hands of the things he hunts. He's meticulous and disciplined, a product of his time in the service, a stint as a sniper with the Rangers. Bucky knows how to handle himself and weapons, the type of shit most amateurs in the game spend years practicing to become moderately proficient.
Even so, he still gets torn up from time to time.
The first time, Darcy sniffs it out herself when he comes over to pick up supplies. She doesn't even ask before her hand is on his ribs, cupping the deep hurt there.
How'd this happen? she asks blandly, as if she's inquiring as to whether he's tried the burger place around the corner whose sign inexplicably features a flopping fish and a mermaid with devil horns. When she squeezes her fingers slightly, he lets out a ragged moan, fresh pain oozing out of the slowly mending bruise. He's pretty sure he's cracked a rib or two, but his chosen profession doesn't come with health insurance, and he's already passed off two fake IDs at Cedars-Sinai, so injuries that will heal on their own are left to their own devices.
(The problem with VA hospitals is their propensity to ask questions, whereas civilian hospitals are too overwhelmed to bother with more than mending the injured and ushering them back out the door. The one time he had bothered with one of the VA hospitals, he had been feverish and let loose his tongue. It had taken him the better part of two weeks to talk himself out of the psych wing.)
He flinches only slightly when she pulls up the side of his shirt to peer at his mottled skin, the impressive spread of purple and yellowing flesh. It twitches under her fingers when she touches it without the the thin layer of cotton between them; the brush of her fingers is critical, like she's assessing the damage deep below with the lightest of touches.
Here, she says, opening one of the cabinets in the hall and pulling out a container of salve. Just a small amount on it before you sleep. You'll heal up twice as quick.
What's this gonna cost me? There's no label on the jar, but there's a small symbol etched into the glass, a triangle intersecting what looks like a delta symbol.
Nothing, Darcy says, her face bathed in the shadows from the low-lit room, her eyes narrow and dark. Her entire face looks like a bear trap, like something designed to lure him in before it snaps shut, devours him whole. It is bizarre how much he trusts her even though he knows bone deep that he shouldn't, that there's no reason for him to place any faith in her. The years have made him hard, but he finds himself expectantly tender for her in ways that he can't fully explain, like she sniffs out all of his weaknesses, the small, infinitesimal bits of the person he used to be. A favour. Later.
You know something I don't? he asks.
The thin smile on her face speaks the volumes she does not. Always.
15.
She tastes different than he expects. He's been feeding for more than three days, the taste of humans remarkably similar across the wide spectrum of physical characteristics. Bucky hadn't understood it before he turned, thought that vampire feeding had simply been a function of survival similar to the human counterpart, but it's more than that. More than a drug or nourishment, it's an absorption of power, a fleeting second of the feeling of life.
This is where Darcy's blood diverges from the rest, hers just a touch sweeter, the feeling of it far too strong as it floods into his mouth. He can feel how quickly her heart is beating, the fear that’s running through her body, but the blood carries far more than that. He can taste how different she is, the source of all that power that’s allowed her to pull those memories from his head. Her fingers are caught in his jacket, neither pulling him toward her nor pushing her away, just holding on as he feeds from her, and it feels so good that he wants to stay here forever, inside of her, tasting her.
The pain starts low in his spine, just a tingle at the small of his back that blooms into unimaginable agony - sharp and hot - by the time it reaches his skull, like his head is being split in two by a sharp, heated knife. Pulling away from her, he feels and hears the depth of the breath she sucks into her lungs as her hands shove his shoulders back and away from her.
Bucky's on his knees in front of her, his head tilted forward like he's in prayer. When he finally cranes his head up, he recognizes the look on her face immediately, the same blend of confusion and corrupted empathy that she gets whenever she's been bumping around inside of his head.
She's had a vision. She's seen what he's done, the choice he made.
Now that he’s had a taste of her, he knows exactly what’s she capable of, the power that she wields. She could end him. He knows it deep in the core of the black hole of his dead chest, the new triggers inside of him that recognize others like him, the quiet hum of her brutal power. She is not the prey here.
They are both predators now.
You're not human, he says as he watches the row of teeth marks in her neck begin to close, the blood that does escape trailing down the pale length of her neck. He watches it, rapt. He wants to lick it away.
Human enough, Darcy parries back as he stands back up, shaking off the lingering echoes of pain. He steps closer to her again, but does not touch her. More than you, at least.
The crack of a gunshot wafts through her open window, the whine of a distant siren and drunken screams.
I warned you, Darcy says gravely.
She kisses him, the blood still on his chin smearing between their mouths.
8.
Bucky shows up on the full moon. By the time she answers the door, there's a thick red puddle on her doorstep under his boots, handprints of it all over her door frame from where he's been holding himself up. Darcy, he says, his voice neither needy nor broken, as solid as it always seems to sound even though it looks like he's bleeding to death in front of her.
His jacket is absolutely soaked in blood, the blue shirt underneath gone all but black with it, but he carries most of his own weight to the bathroom as she ushers him inside. Peeling off the shirt carefully, she assesses the wounds, deep and long, tracing down the entire length of his back, like something had clawed him from neck to hip. They're not as bad as she had assumed from the amount of blood, and she knows of a few ways to close them without stitches, without having to employ the unreliable methods of medicinal treatment. In reality, they're far too deep to stitch closed in her bathroom anyway, these wounds easily serious enough to warrant a trip to the hospital.
Bucky's sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, Darcy standing over him, resting against the dull edge of the counter. In the crisp light of the bathroom, the red of his blood is vibrant, the tracks of the wounds almost beautiful in their brutality. She cleans them carefully, drawing out the shards of cloth and broken glass, using the t-shirt she had discarded on the bathroom floor that morning to sop up the blood that floods down his back as she works.
Hold still, she says, concentrating carefully, her hands resting over the claw marks delicately. He lets out a rough moan as the skin beneath her hands begins to warm, his head ducking down to loll between his shoulders. The ragged, puckered edges of skin draw together, finding each other amidst the scar tissue beginning to form.
She lets out a quiet, sharp hiss when the pain starts to rise in her own body. Like an angry dog, he snaps his body around, his hand locking down on the delicate bones of her wrist. What are you doing? he snarls, and for a moment she wonders if he knows, if the question is rhetorical, more of a question of her sanity than of her actions. He sounds angry, but it's not anger, more like a reflex caught in the adrenaline and aggression of the fight.
He's watching her throat as she swallows, his eyes flickering up to hers when she doesn't answer. The small fan in the ceiling rattles, and when he draws her down, the hand not around her wrist tangling into her hair, she goes. Bucky's mouth is over hers before her knees touch the floor, eating at her roughly, pushing her back so he can climb down on the floor with her.
He's on top of her then, his weight pressing her down into the cold tile of her bathroom floor, the towels covered in blood and water resting around them, one of them partially under her legs.
Unguarded, she is vulnerable, and as soon as she touches the bare skin of his shoulders, it starts flooding in, the images and thoughts that don't belong to her, the dark part of him bleeding into her mind. Each person she touches has their own flavour, some mix of emotion that permeates their memories and thoughts. Bucky's are awash in guilt and anger, even the memories she can feel that are happy.
Darcy’s seen the girl before, but the slip of a boy that blooms into a force of a man is new. She’s sure he’s the owner of the second pair of dog tags that Bucky wears. He’s bright - kind - and the memories that Bucky carries of him are vivid enough that she can taste the affection in them. They’re buried though, deep enough that Darcy knows immediately how staggering the loss was. How much Bucky loved him.
Look at me, she hears him say, and it's only then that she realizes her eyes are pinned shut. She does, her eyes opening slowly, sore in the unforgiving light. Bucky untangles his fingers from her hair, bracing himself above her with both hands, and stares at her, his chest ragged with breath. She watches the muscle there expand and contract, the quiet hint of rib bone under skin and muscle. There's a quiet, vicious beauty in it, the way the body dances together, the expression of pain and pleasure.
Hurt me, she says, and his mouth parts in shock. She knows he won't, that he's not the kind to hurt. But he will be.
When he doesn't move, she leans up and kisses him, her teeth finding his bottom lip and her fingers finding the half-healed skin of his back and digging in. Bucky scrabbles at her shorts blindly, still staring at her as his fingers tangle in them and jerk, dragging them and her panties down her thighs.
He fucks her for the first time on the floor of her bathroom, the smell of his blood everywhere.
9.
Bucky asks her directly only once.
It's after the first time he fucks her, when he wakes in her bed and her sheets are covered in blood - his blood. But when he wakes, when he climbs out of her bed and walks on shaky legs to her bathroom (the floor of which is also still covered in blood, dark and crusty, soaked into the small towel strewn near the bathtub), he finds the deep lacerations in his back have closed up, that the healing skin is pink and warm to the touch.
He finds her in the kitchen, sitting at her small table in a thin shirt and panties, her heels perched on the edge of the chair, knees pressed against her chest. She's facing the windows, and he can see the edge of something peeking out from the collar of her shirt, a thin sliver of a scar that he knows must match the one healing on his back. Darcy's hand shakes as she reaches for the cup of tea in front of her, and when he finally makes it beside her, the dark circles under her eyes confirms his suspicions, even though he's unsure of the conclusion. That is why he asks.
What are you? It comes out of his mouth harsher than he means it to, like an accusation.
She laughs, but it's a brittle sound. He knows that she's not really offended, only feigning it for his benefit; so much of her is an act at times, pasted upon her features. She doesn't look amused now, though, even as she laughs, but she doesn't really look angry either. She looks only tired. Should I be insulted?
No. He sits in the chair next to her, his legs spread to accommodate the closeness of her, her pale, bruised thighs (marks from his fingers, he realizes) that have lowered from her chest to rest properly on the chair.
I didn't think so, she says, and the smile on her lips as she brings her tea to them is genuine.
When he takes off her clothes again, this time against the counter in the kitchen, her back is a mirror of his own.
16.
He won't ask her if she had a vision, though Darcy's certain he knows she did. When he pulls back that first time, when she pushes her power on him and makes him hurt, her blood all over his mouth, he looks as though he can taste it, the memories twisting in the back of her mind.
Because this is what she sees: he had been given a choice. The man - the one whose dog tags he wears, the one he calls Steve in his sleep - had stood above him, Bucky's blood sliding down over his chin messily, and he had given him a choice.
Because he loved him, Steve had told him. Because Steve missed him. It had been too long, too many years running from him, too many years refusing Steve’s offer. Steve was no longer willing to wait. Please don’t leave me, Bucky.
And Bucky, in that moment, had been scared to die. He had felt his hands beginning to chill, his body refusing to answer the requests of his mind, limbs lazy with death, and he had been overcome with fear. Fear of death, fear of loss. Because she can taste it as warm and metallic as her blood in her mouth: Bucky loves him.
Bucky had been given a choice and accepted Steve's torn wrist, asked for it and swallowed down the thick bitter crimson that flowed from it as his heartbeat had faded into nothingness.
She knows he sees it too, if only because it's the first time she has ever seen him wear shame.
10.
What? he asks roughly. Bucky's lazing on her couch; the motel he's been crashing in for the week doesn't have working air conditioning and he had sought refuge at her place hoping it was somewhat cooler. Instead, he found her part of the city darkened by the rolling blackouts to ease the overworked power grid, knew her air conditioning would be decidedly out.
(He tries not to think about how he knocked on her door anyway. How he's come to think of her place as a home base more than the shitty rooms he rents in the disreputable motels that he floats between.)
It's too hot to move, too hot to breathe. He's shirtless, pants slung low on his hips, while she's practically topless too, a loose camisole half-soaked with sweat and a black pair of panties. When he touches her leg, she yanks it away, their skin making an awful, sticky sucking noise as it pulls apart.
Your tattoos, she says, motioning to the trigger sight on his chest, just above his heart, and the art on his arm. Army?
She doesn’t ask why he wears two sets of dog tags around his neck, and for that he’s infinitely grateful. It’s been nearly five years since he lost Steve, and the wound still hasn’t closed.
(He also doesn’t want to talk about why he came to LA, why he couldn’t kill Steve when he was turned, made into the same kind of thing that killed his sister and left her in his bed.)
Rangers. He lifts the sweating beer bottle to his mouth. Sniper in Afghanistan.
He wonders momentarily if she's one of those types that rails about the war; the truth is they've never talked about anything other than the trade, about the stupid things she seems to pluck out of his head that she has no right to. He knows how to make her come, the way her body feels around him, under him. He knows how the scar on the small of her back feels against the palm of his hand. But he doesn't know her. It should scare him more than it does.
She just sighs, takes a chug of her beer, and says, Was it hotter there or here?
Bucky laughs. There. But not by much.
Lifting the bag of half-frozen peas off the back of her neck, she tosses it to him, reaching for the bag of corn over her thigh and leaning back so she can rest it on the top of her chest.
What about you? he asks. She's got an intricate sign inked between her shoulder blades, a melding of a blair witch and an infinity symbol. Army? he adds cheekily.
Darcy's eyebrow bends, a sly smile spreading over her face. In a manner of speaking.
11.
I'd tell you it's not your fault, but I think you already know that. She's sitting on the edge of the bed, her back to him, bare. There's a clear ridge of bone visible, dissecting the pale, smooth skin of her back. He's never noticed how deceptive her body is, the soft curves and supple flesh hiding a frightening power. How she always seems like more than the sum of her parts, clever, deceitful eyes hidden in the face of a girl that looks nothing like a threat, more like the girls he’d gone after in high school, the ones that sprayed perfume behind their knees and let him stick his hand up their skirts behind the gym when no one was looking.
Shut up, Bucky says, his words equal parts anger and vulnerability, Bucky infinitely uncomfortable with the latter. When she turns her chin to look at him over her shoulder, his breath catches in his chest, a chill suddenly growing in the room.
He's known for a long while that she's her own version of a predator, not a neutral class in any shape or form, that she doesn't kill in the way that he does, that she doesn't exert her power in an effort to dominate. But he knows in this moment that she could. That she is just as dangerous as he is.
They say losing a twin is like losing a part of yourself, Darcy says, looking away again. Sometimes though… you’re not sure which one hurts more.
17.
Bucky pushes her down into the bed.
Everything is sharper this time: the laundered smell of her sheets, the roughness of them against his skin, the sound of the frame of her bed as it absorbs their weight, the thick smell of her arousal, the perfect rhythmic beat of her heart racing in her chest. He's spent countless nights between her sheets, but this feels new, like something he's never experienced before. It feels overwhelming, a strange urge beyond the normal tug of lust, a desperate need to be inside of her, to feel her.
(It will only hit him later, how similar the urge to fuck and the urge to feed are. How they are seemingly intertwined, how he can't feed without thinking of her, how he'll find himself drawn to her apartment after he's finished. How it's more about her than anything else, the feeling decidedly not arbitrary in its subject.)
Bucky rocks his hips into her, savoring the sounds she makes as he tears open her shirt, the buttons snapping off easily, scattering over her bed and falling onto the wood floor. She's not wearing anything underneath, just bare pale skin.
Hurt me, she says, and lets out a sharp gasp when his teeth sink into the warm flesh just above her breast.
12.
He can still taste her on his tongue when she speaks. This time it's of the dead, though she doesn't give them a name; Bucky's pretty sure she's sussed it out from the photos in his wallet and the tags around his neck, from whatever she gleans from him when he comes to her apartment, when he sits on her couch and barters for the goods he knows she gives him for a price that is already beyond fair, when she invites him into her bed.
To be a hunter, you have to lose everything, she explains. It's not exactly hard to figure out, with or without seeing what's rattling around in that head of yours. Never met a hunter that hasn't lost everything. Or at least thinks he has.
Anyone else and he thinks he might be angry, he might call them a presumptuous fuck, but it's not a lie and he can't force the anger up out of himself. He wants to think it's the sex, that it's temporarily mollified him, but the truth is that the fire that had made him fight so hard and recklessly at first has been slowly dying, turning to cinder, the will to continue fighting entirely fueled by memories that are beginning to fade.
And a psychic?
Different. It's not a choice. You don't choose to see these things. Darcy’s sheets - thin white cotton that smells like lemon - are covering her breasts, but when she reaches up to run her fingers over the headboard he sees the dusky pink of a nipple.
But you're not a psychic. He can't help but feel like she's holding something back, that she does more than see things, but he doesn't push the subject. He isn't sure he wants to know.
You don't have to see the future to be a psychic, Bucky, she says plainly. And you don't need to see the future to know what it is, what it will be. You see enough of someone's past, of what makes them tick, you can predict within an acceptable margin of error where they will end up.
Where will I end up, then? It comes out like a tease, light and pointed even with the heaviness of her orgasm still in the air, the dark tone of the conversation lingering.
There's no smile. The look on her face is a reflection of the weariness he feels, old in a way that seems entirely unnatural.
You definitely don't need to be a psychic to figure out that one out.
18.
When she wakes, he is gone. The sweet California sun is drifting in through her half-closed blinds, warming her sheets. They are covered in blood. Hers, this time.
Darcy showers quickly, the water slicking off her body gone pink before it slides down the drain, her hands lingering over the bite marks over her breast and thigh. She presses them meanly and feels herself grow warm between her legs at the pain.
She doesn't heal them.
Her first customer of the day is a referral, a young man who runs a brothel east of the city. When he shakes her hand, she sees the coyotes who bring him desperate girls snuck over the border, sees the spot up in the hills that he uses to bury the ones who refuse to work or try to escape. Darcy smiles as he tells him about the great fortune that awaits him, that his lucky numbers are nine and thirty-three, that he shouldn't marry the girl he's been seeing for a few months, that her sign conflicts with his. She touches his wrist and leaves her mark as he pays her, grins meanly and tells him to come back soon, that his second appointment is on the house.
The next day he drowns to death in blood on dry land, his garbled screams echoing up and down Wilshire.
Across town, a stillborn infant takes a sudden, ragged breath and lets out a shrill wail.
Bucky comes back three days later, shortly after the sun sets. The last invitation still stands, but he waits until she invites him in before he steps over the threshold.
(Behind him, she can see the blond man from Bucky's memories, watching from the shadows.)