Archive of Our Own

Hot dogs and a walk in the park turned into once-a-week movie nights and unexpected coffee breaks, and Captain America showing up at Stark Tower “just to say hello”, a lot more often than he used to. Tony was handling it as gracefully as, well... Tony handled anything, really. He was trying. Almost.

“You know, I’m being very gracious about this whole thing.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Yes, Tony.”

“Most bosses would not be very understanding of this... situation.”

“You mean employees having a personal life?”

“Yes. No.” Tony waved a hand. “I mean, obviously, I’m perfectly okay with you having a personal life. Or Legal tells me that I have to be, because otherwise there’d be lawsuits.”

“That’s one thing I enjoy about working with you, Stark. Your big-ass heart.”

“I’m a giver, it’s true.”

Darcy snorted. “Yeah, sure.”

“You’ve had at least three nights off in the last two month. That’s practically vacation time.”

“You’re not seriously pouting right now, are you?” Darcy looked up from triaging Tony’s inbox. “Because that is something I’ve trained three-year-olds not to do around me.”

“I’m a forty-five-year-old man, Lewis. I do not pout.”

“I could take a picture and send it to Merriam-Webster right now. You know what they’d text me back? ‘Pout: noun. The expression Tony Stark is wearing in this photograph.’”

“Pepper tells me you’re not going to be available again tonight.”

“Pepper’s very good at my job,” Darcy said firmly. “She perfected my job, actually, and writes my performance reviews, so she can handle running the blender and holding off the board for a night. And more importantly, she is perfectly willing to do so, that I might have a night off to make kissy noises at my boyfriend, not holding a needy inventor’s hand.”

“As previously mentioned, I’m a grown man, and despite the various professional opinions the board has commissioned, I may be a narcissist but I’m not needy.”

“You’re delusional. You’re incredibly needy,” Darcy said. “You may, in fact, be the neediest person I know. And you haven’t met my mother, so you don’t know what an incredible statement of belief that is.”

“It has to be tonight?”

Darcy raised her eyebrows. “What do you need, needy-man?”

“I don’t need anything. As previously stated, I am not needy.”

“Fine then. What do you want?”

Tony shifted. “I’m wondering how certain you are that Cap is the guy you want to be with. I mean -- the man’s never sat through an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

“I’m willing to bet you’ve never done that, either.” Darcy raised a hand to fend off Tony’s protest. “While high does not count.”

“Hey, if we’re not counting chemically-enhanced entertainment viewing, then I’ve never seen any of the Monty Python films, either.”

Darcy gave up on getting anything else done. “Where’s Pepper?”

“In Malibu, until the end of the week. Possibly the beginning of the next. Why? What are you saying?”

“I would not at all be saying that you’re a lot easier to handle when you’re getting laid on a regular basis. Except that’s totally what I’m saying.”

Tony willfully ignored her. “He’s old enough to be your grandfather. And he’s probably still thawing. All the good bits are probably still frozen.”

“All the ‘good bits’ are in working order, thank you very much.”

“Wait.” Tony raised a finger.  “Are you saying you’ve operation-tasted Captain America’s yahoo?”

“I’m not having this conversation.” Darcy said. “We can talk about your sex life. We can talk about the sex life of African ground squirrels. We can talk about the sex lives of the general population, but we are not having a conversation about my sex life.”

“Because you’re not having any.” Tony said, triumphantly.

Darcy crossed her arms over her chest. “When did you grow a vagina, again?

Tony raised his eyebrows. “You’re avoiding the question. Is this a sticking point?”

“No. It’s definitely not a sticking point. And if it were, I would not be having this conversation with my boss.”

“You’re not having this conversation with your boss.” Tony tilted his head to the side. “You’re having this conversation with a concerned friend.”

“And why are you concerned?”

Tony shrugged. “You know. He’s a buddy. You’re a buddy. I want to make sure your buddy-relationship doesn’t blow up, forcing me to get rid of two buddies.”

“Tony, you are the only man I know who can be the sweetest man alive and a complete ass at the same time.”

Tony smirked. “It’s a unique talent.”

“And I’m sure your mother used to tell you you were special every night,” Darcy said, closing her laptop.

Tony shrugged. “As a matter of fact, she didn’t. Mom wasn’t overly fond of me, if the truth be told. Tolerant, sure. But calling her affectionate would be a stretch.” Tony coughed. “Doesn’t matter. Pep thinks I’m special. For a number of reasons. Only a few of which have to do with my penis.”

Darcy wasn’t quite sure what to say to any of that, but was saved from having to by Tony’s cell phone ringing.

“Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. Pep, gorgeous, what are you wearing? Go slow and give me lots of details. Actually, hold that thought. Darcy?”

“Yeah?”

“Enjoy your night off. See you later.”

**

Steve stood outside Darcy’s door, one hand in a pocket, shifting from side to side. “Darce? Are you going to let me in?”

“Yeah -- just a second!” He could hear the sound of Darcy running from one end of her (extremely small) apartment to the other, and the slight clunk of something hitting the floor. “Dammit. Hold on, Steve...”  A few seconds later, Darcy’s flushed face appeared in the doorway. “Sorry about that. Come on in.”

“Not a problem,” Steve said. “Ready to go?”

“Mostly,” Darcy said. “I’ve got to find this other heel. It shouldn’t take me too much longer. Do you think we’ll actually make it to the show this time?”

“If we don’t, I owe Barton twenty bucks,” Steve said with a rueful smile.

“Well, now that you’ve got money riding on the line, maybe we should make a concerted effort,” Darcy said. “Aha! Found it! Although I should ask... are we taking the bike?”

“Stark loaned me a car for the evening, since I thought it might be a bit chilly and... well. You keep having to change into leggings.”

“Not a sacrifice I mind making,” Darcy quipped.

“But this way I get to see your legs,” Steve said, making a valiant effort not to blush. “I figured I could owe Tony a solid for that reason.”

Darcy lifted an eyebrow. “Should I do a slow turn?”

Steve took her hand and gently led her into a spin, pulling her close enough to kiss. “Hello.”

“Hi to you too. If you start that, we won’t get much past hello, and I put on eyeliner for this.”

“Good point.” Steve drew himself up. “Very good point.”

“So no more of that, unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Darcy said firmly.

Steve laughed. “What constitutes absolute necessity?”

Darcy shrugged. “I leave that up to your discretion. I just know that I find it absolutely necessary that you kiss me again. Right now.”

They were only a few minutes late out the door.

**

Going out with Steve was much different than going out with any guy Darcy had ever dated before. It wasn’t even the obvious differences in social expectations between the ‘40s and the modern era. It was that Steve was obviously attracted to her and had no problem making that known (maybe more subtly than most guys would), but he also found her incredibly interesting and claimed her sarcasm and humor were grounding. He liked talking about books. He could discuss art intelligently, and once he’d seen a movie, he was completely comfortable with geeking out over it.

Then there was his lack of knowledge of the cultural subtext she usually took for granted -- it sometimes made having a conversation difficult, but it also made her look at everything with fresh eyes, and fought off some of the cynicism that threatened to overwhelm her from time to time. Although SHIELD had done their best to catch him up on everything that had happened during World War II (Steve couldn’t bring himself to talk about what he thought of the concentration camps, the death camps and the slaughter of the Jews that Germany had mostly succeeded in covering up during Steve’s time. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that something like that had been happening right under her nose and she hadn’t known or done something about it. It would be even worse for Steve, who felt he had a responsibility to do everything he could for everyone, to the point of exhaustion.) She couldn’t be flip or dismissive with Steve, about most things... and while sometimes that was frustrating, sometimes that was … liberating.

“I don’t know how Pepper kept the job for ten years,” she said, slowly sipping a glass of red wine. They were speaking of her work, since Steve hadn’t been doing anything he could tell her about the last month or so, outside of a few charity appearances. “Obviously, I knew he would be demanding, but I didn’t know he’d be like this. He’s like a charming, needy, brilliant puppy.”

“I knew Howard,” Steve said. “He was a little of those things, but Tony is sometimes a bit more than I can handle.”

Darcy blinked. “You did?”

“Yeah -- he was one of the scientists that helped Erskine execute the serum and then metabolize it,” Steve said, casually. “And then he was around a bit during the war.”

“What was he like?” Darcy sat forward. “Tony doesn’t talk about him a lot, except in public when it would be expected, you know?”

“He had a lot of flash. A lot of style. He thought well of himself.” Steve drew in a breath. “But, you know, he also flew right into enemy airspace. He searched for me for the rest of his life. He was a good friend. He was... complicated.”

“You know, it probably hasn’t helped your relationship with Tony that he knows all that stuff about your relationship with his father.”

Steve shrugged. “Tony’s a good man, too. He’s just an ass.” Steve waved off Darcy’s proud grin. “We’re better off than we were.”

And there was the other thing about dating Steve. When it came to having a conversation about emotions, he was just like any other guy she’d ever known: willing to play. Up to a point. And then the subject was closed.

She shrugged, and thought no more of it, looking around her at the small bistro Steve had found. They were both very conscious of the media attention surrounding the Avengers, and tried to find neighborhood establishments where there was a low risk of running into the “go out to be seen” crowd. Not that Steve would have been embarrassed to be photographed with her, but it was better to hold off that day as long as possible, they both thought.

Thus, he spent most of the time with a baseball cap on his head and large sunglasses. He’d even thought about growing a beard. (Darcy had put her foot down on that one. He wasn’t, after all, Captain Canadian Mounty.) At the moment, though, he looked like himself, if a slightly-updated version from the man she’d first met, exchanging his khakis for a pair of jeans. Not that it had been a radical change. Darcy figured she could identify him at 500 feet, just based on posture alone. No one else in the world stood quite that tall under the weight of the world.

“The picture starts in twenty minutes, if you want to start walking over now,” Steve said, after they’d thrown some cash on the table to cover the bill and a bit more.

“Sure,” Darcy said, taking Steve’s hand to walk out the door.

And that’s when everything changed, in the flashing of a camera, and that horrible moment when Darcy realized their grace period was over. She clung to Steve’s hand, and tried not to duck her head.

Later, she would look at the photo, and see in it a woman wearing a mask of strength and courage, and a man who knew exactly what it was he had to lose.

**

“I’m sorry about what happened tonight,” Steve said, first thing as Darcy opened the door to her apartment. “I know it was... awkward and uncomfortable.”

Darcy shrugged. “I knew what could happen all the way back on our first date, Steve. It wasn’t like it was a surprise.”

He laid his hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eyes. “Knowing it and really knowing it are two separate things. I’m going to... listen, Darcy. If you want to take some time and figure out if this is what you really want, if you want to sort through... stuff, then... I’ll completely understand.”

“Steve --”

“Let me finish. But... I need you to make a decision, Darcy. I don’t want to pressure you. Take your time. But if you decide to be my girl... it would just about kill me later on if you decided that the Cap part of me was too much to handle.”

“I’m not scared,” Darcy said firmly. “And getting ambushed by boundary-insensitive paparazzi may not be my favorite thing. But I love all the things about you that make you Captain America, Steve, so...”

His smile was slow, warm... and completely genuine. It about stopped her heart. “Okay, so... you’re in?”

“I’m in,” Darcy said, beaming.

Steve swept her into his arms, and something molten crept down her spine and pooled in the pit of her stomach. She’d never been one to go for jocks before, but there was something about the fact that Steve could (literally) bench press her did funny things to her heart, and her stomach and... every other part of her.

Their lips met. Slowly at first, deliberately. That careful reassurance (you’re still here, I’m still here, we’re still here and we’re still we) slowly grew into something more, and Steve walked her into the kitchen to set her on the nearest counter so they could comfortably neck, his hands in her hair and her hands everywhere she could reach.

His hands were at the hem of her t-shirt before she even realized they’d gone that far. He paused. “Darcy -- do you want to? I mean, we can stop, but we need to stop... now. Basically.”

“I want to.” Darcy laid her hands over his, and helped draw the t-shirt over her head. “More than anything, I want to.”

Steve, despite popular opinion, wasn’t a virgin, for all that he wasn’t exactly experienced, and Darcy could count on two fingers the number of men she’d slept with, so they stumbled a few times. It certainly wasn’t the most suave sex in the history of the world. But it was good. And funny in parts, and serious in others, and intense and complacent and comforting and... good.

And the second time was even better.

**

“If you thought we were serious before, you have no idea what you’re in for now,” Natasha said, her countenance almost expressionless as she waited for Darcy to finish getting ready for their daily training session.

“I already kind of hate you,” Darcy said, tying her hair up into a knot. “Are you sure about this?”

“I don’t care if you hate me,” Natasha said, “I just want you to stay alive long enough to get to sleep with the boyfriend you’re about to give up your privacy for.”

“Okay. If you put it like that, I guess I can drum up some enthusiasm for these procedures.”

“Good. Now, duck.”

“What? Ouch, Jesus! Nat!” Darcy hadn’t been able to stop Natasha’s roundhouse kick from swiping her ear. The fact that she’d only brushed skin was more a testament of Natasha’s skill than Darcy’s luck.

“Lesson one: We don’t wait for the bell to ring anymore. It’s game on, all the time.”

**

Darcy is developing an impressive cross. Try not to get worry lines on your genetically-modified brow, Cap. Your girlfriend can take care of herself. Focus on making it out of Russia alive with Barton in one piece. -- NR

Steve let out a breath and leaned against his seat, closing his phone with a snap.

“Doing all right back there, Cap?” Hawkeye guided the Jeep down a backroad in Moscow.

“Yes.” Steve closed his eyes and drew in a breath and refocused his attention on the mission at hand -- cleaning up the mess left by some Hydra tech the Soviets had recovered and then sold to the highest bidder, instead of what he’d been turning over in his mind before.

That his picture had been taken was of no concern to him -- he was used to his picture being taken. As a point of fact, it had been an (annoying) component of his job description during the war. That his picture had been taken while he wasn’t being Cap -- while he wasn’t “on” -- that was slightly more troublesome.

The fact that his picture had been taken with Darcy, who would now have to bear the burden of increased danger and a lack of privacy that he wouldn’t wish on anyone, let alone a woman he was growing not just to lust after and appreciate intellectually, but well and truly love....

That was more troublesome than he could articulate.

He wanted pictures with her -- pictures taken by friends. Pictures of barbeques and at weddings and pictures of dancing and pictures of laughing. What he didn’t want was a picture of her with a slightly terrified look in her eyes, trying to look for all of the world like it wasn’t about to crash down around her shoulders. He wanted to give her everything he could -- and a life free of that kind of pressure was on the top of his list.

But -- his demons whispered -- if she chose that kind of life, if she knew well beforehand what being with you would mean, possibly better than you....

Steve shoved it all back to the corner of his mind as Barton stopped the Jeep. “Ready to rock and roll, Cap?”

“Always.”

**

Whatever it was that he was expecting, it wasn’t what he found in that abandoned warehouse. Weapons that fired the mysterious blue light that had been so devastating the first time he’d seen it -- sure. But not the lackeys that were so proficient at firing it, grazing his side and actually leaving a mark.

“Some things never change, eh Cap?” Hawkeye asked as he loaded his bow and took out several of the assailants at once.

“Distressingly, no,” Steve said -- and then he caught something out of the corner of his eye. A flash in the background. Something that didn’t seem like it belonged. Something human, but too fast to be ordinary.

He heard the crack of a gun, and ducked just in time to avoid being taken out by the bullet, his shield going over his head automatically.

“We’re taking sniper fire,” Hawkeye said, maneuvering closer to Steve. “Can you get a sense of where it’s coming from?”

Steve looked around. “Not without another bullet. And if he’s smart, he’s on the move.”

“Precisely what I thought, too,” Hawkeye said, loading his arrow. “Let’s both keep our eyes op...”

Another ringer of a shot, another dodge, but this time Steve was ready for it. “Over there, Hawkeye!”

Without blinking an eye, Hawkeye loaded the arrow and shot blind, right where Steve was pointing in the ceiling of the warehouse. And Captain America watched in horror as Bucky Barnes fell from the rafters and hit the floor.

**

Darcy opened her door and smiled at her unexpected visitor. “Hey, you.”

“Hey.” Steve leaned to one side, holding his ribs with one hand while he leaned on the doorway. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

Darcy’s jaw was already dropping. “Jesus! Are you hurt? I thought that was impossible.”

Steve grinned ruefully. “It’s not impossible. Just... really, really difficult. And would it be... I mean, can I come in?”

“Yes, absolutely... I should just give you a key one of these days,” Darcy said under her breath. “You want anything? Painkiller? Ice? Alcohol? Sympathy?”

“I’ll metabolize the painkiller too fast for it to do anything, but I would definitely take the ice. And the sympathy.”

“Okay, the ice I can promise will be top-quality, but you should know I’m shit at doing the traditional female hand-holding thing. My mom was all about telling me to grow the fuck up and deal with shit, so that part of my brain is a little dead? But we can definitely give it a shot.”

Steve laughed as he slowly made his way over to the couch. “Darcy, I don’t need you to be... a traditional female... whatever. I need you to be you.”

Darcy shrugged. “Okay. That I can do.”

“We found Bucky.”

“Bucky?” Darcy wrapped a towel around the ice pack she got from the freezer and scanned her memory. “Your friend who died seventy-one years ago? Falling off of a mountain?”

“Yes.”

She tossed him the ice pack and reached for the liquor cabinet. “...I’m going to need a drink.”

**

Steve, as a general rule, didn’t talk much about his past, but when he did, he only really talked about a few people. When he mentioned his mother, it was with fondness and respect. He didn’t have anything to say about the father he’d never got a chance to meet, other than to somewhat clinically tell Darcy he wasn’t the only boy on his block to grow up without a father because of the first war. He had a sort of amused tolerance when he spoke of the nuns that had run the orphanage he was raised in.

But Bucky Barnes, he talked about. Peggy Carter, he talked about.

Darcy’s bread and butter for years had been academia, and she had no qualms at all about Googling the crap out of whatever names came out of Steve’s mouth. She would never meet any of the people who had been instrumental in forming who Steve Rogers was, and felt like a nag when she pressed him for information, so... to Google she went.

She learned that Peggy Carter had stuck around after the end of the war, helping to  keep relations between the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army civil and mutually beneficial, and she’d helped Howard Stark and his allies found and fund SHIELD, and she’d paved the way for the agency’s near-revolutionary record of hiring, retaining and compensating women fairly. Darcy had even been able to pull up some of the papers and public statements that Peggy had made, and there had been a lot to admire in the agent’s skill, and take-charge attitude. In an era and a business dominated by men, Peggy Carter had taken no prisoners.

And she’d married, too. No kids, kept her own name. She’d loved Steve, that much was clear, but she hadn’t spent her life pining for what might have been, and Darcy admired her all the more for it.

She’d even managed to find the name and the number of the nursing home Peggy Carter currently lived in. She’d slipped the information into Steve’s pocket, and he’d repaid her with a lingering kiss to her cheek, but he didn’t say anything.

Bucky Barnes, there was less to find on. She discovered through a census record that he’d been orphaned and raised in the same place Steve was. She found his enlistment record, and she found his death certificate.

Steve talked about him the most too -- she figured it was because he’d been working on processing that loss when he’d gone down in the plane. It wasn’t nearly as shocking as losing, well... everyone else. He’d mentioned off-hand the kid he’d been: sickly, with no sense of self-preservation, and his hero, Bucky, who would step in to save him when his mouth would run ahead of his good sense.

Sometimes, though, he talked about Bucky in his sleep. Not that Steve was the cliched tortured hero who couldn’t get a full eight hours if he needed it -- partially because Steve honestly didn’t sleep much. Darcy got the impression that when he fell asleep on her couch while they were watching movies, that was all the sleep he required. Or allowed himself. And sometimes -- rarely -- those naps were interrupted, and Steve would sit bolt upright and look around like he couldn’t remember where he was.

And sometimes, just before he’d snap awake, he’d say one name -- Bucky.

**

Darcy made her way down to the SHIELD basement where they’re keeping Bucky -- the Winter Soldier, apparently, because nobody just used their names around here -- with a little bit of luck, a lot of talent, and a lack of concern for the truth which was truly stunning. Still, she figured if SHIELD really and truly didn’t want her down here, they’d find a way to stop her. In truth, their security measures had been more than a little lax.

Steve had told her what to expect: that his friend had been brainwashed, erased, replaced, reset, rewiped, renewed and revamped so many times it was going to be difficult to find the kid from Brooklyn who used to regularly beat up Steve’s tormentors under all of that bullshit. But the look in his eyes -- the hope that something from his old life might...

Well, it’s enough to keep her up at night.

She turned the corner to his cell and found herself pressed up against a wall with a knife to her throat. “Don’t fucking move,” a man... who could only be Bucky (Steve had warned her about the metal arm) growled.

Darcy raised her hands in the universal ‘don’t hurt me’ gesture. “Not moving. Definitely not moving!”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m Darcy Lewis, and I’d very much like to live through this encounter and then figure out why you’re not in a cage they built for the Hulk, although.... exponentially more the former than the latter.”

“Don’t like cages. Don’t like walls.” Bucky broke away from her, taking the knife away from her throat and grasped his head. “Oh, shit...  Fuck that hurts.”

“Are you okay?”

“Scrambled on the inside, broken on the out. Lights are too bright in here. Way too bright.”

“Ms. Lewis?” Agent Coulson -- who was supposed to be dead, dammit, no one ever stayed dead (Yay for Steve! Just... confusing. On a primitive level) -- rushed in and grabbed Bucky’s arm. “I’m afraid Mr. Barnes is not yet stable.”

“I’ll say. Do you regularly give the prisoners fucking knives?” Darcy snapped. “I’d think that’d be basic Prisoner Keeping 101.”

“Barnes has sticky fingers and is very resourceful.”

“Thanks, Agent, love you too,” Barnes crooned. “Oh, my fucking head. What’s the mission? Where am I at?”

“Our efforts to bring his memories back have been... partially successful,” Coulson said, as he helped Bucky back to a (carefully padded) cell.

“Jesus,” Darcy breathed. “No wonder Steve won’t talk about this.”

Coulson had the grace to look abashed. “I imagine it’s a little horrifying.”

“If I ever get brainwashed, just fucking shoot me, if this is how you deal with it,” Darcy said.

“We’ve got some ideas. We’re testing some theories... the ultimate goal is to bring Barnes back to himself without doing any permanent damage. But he doesn’t seem to age, and he’s very susceptible to suggestion at the moment, so for now the best place for him is...”

“An asylum cell straight out of the 20th century?” Darcy asked.

“Yes. For lack of a better idea, yes.” Coulson cleared his throat. “Now. What were you doing down here?”

Darcy shrugged. “It’s pretty customary for the girlfriend to know the boyfriend’s friends. I thought I’d introduce myself.”

“Why don’t we try that again sometime? Only this time, let’s put something nice and solid like reinforced steel and bulletproof glass between you two. Just in case.” Coulson gestured to a room on the other side of the hallway. “Even Cap practices that basic safety precaution. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go requisition a replacement lock. Again.”

**

“I hear you went and tried to introduce yourself to Bucky Barnes,” Natasha said, her arms over her chest, as Darcy walked in with her gym bag first thing the next morning.

“Not my brightest idea. But then I used to eat crayons and I learned not to do that, so let’s not dwell on this, okay?”

Natasha had to visibly steady herself. “How did he look?”

“Uh -- physically? He seemed all right? He could stand to put on a few pounds.”

Natasha nodded. “And... otherwise?”

“He came across... a little confused.” Darcy lifted her eyebrows. “Did you know him?”

“I knew The Winter Soldier,” Natasha said, flatly, her every microexpression hyper-controlled, which told Darcy more than an actual expression would have. “I’m not sure I’ve ever met this... Bucky Barnes.”  

“Why don’t you go down there and see if there’s something that you... recognize? Inside of him?”

Natasha lifted one side of her mouth. “The only one who would be pleased to see The Soldier return would be me.... there’s no need to risk a relapse to satisfy my idle curiosity.”

“But it’s not, is it?” Darcy narrowed her eyes. “It’s not idle curiosity at all. You love him.”

Natasha laughed. “Once.” She settled down into a fighting stance. “In the manner of children.”

“You’re actually breaking my heart a little here.”

“Good. You’ll be easier to take down, then.”

“Oh, please. Like I was a challenge --” Darcy found herself, once again, flying through the air, this time with a little more control than she might have managed before “--before. Shit.”

“Quad erat demonstratum.” Natasha dusted her hands. “Pick yourself up and come at me.”

“I would really rather do almost anything else with you in this mood.”

Natasha snorted. “Not choice time, Lewis.”

“Oh, God, now you sound like Tony.” Darcy got to her feet slowly, and dusted off her pants.

Natasha wrinkled her nose. “There’s no need to insult me.”

**

Steve actually had an office at Avengers tower -- not that he used it much, but sometimes, when he wanted to be alone, or he had to fill out paperwork, or he didn’t want to be too far away from Darcy he could be found there. The decor was mid-century bachelor chic, or so Darcy called it. Baseball memorabilia from the era he could remember, framed photos of the Howling Commandos, and some sketches he’d done during the war that Peggy Carter had saved for him graced the walls. The furniture was as plain and as comfortable as he could find it, much to Tony’s chagrin. It smelled faintly of coffee and must, and overall, Steve liked being there. He just thought having an office to be a superhero was a touch absurd.

But that’s where he was, his door locked, but his light on, a few days after they’d taken Bucky in, his fingers tapping on the desk as he contemplated the report Dr. Banner had just handed him.

It seemed his choices would never stop coming back to haunt him -- the serum that had been intended to create an army had only created a figurehead, but that didn’t stop the powers of the world from seeing what such a figurehead could do, and seek to emulate it, on a grand scale. Bruce had taken one look at Bucky’s blood and had pronounced it Frankenstein’s monster. Perhaps not on the same level as Banner’s own, but it was clear that when Zola had captured Bucky, he’d been trying out his own version of the serum.

Something Bucky had never told him.

But then there were things that Steve hadn’t told Bucky, either, in the course of their lives. Maybe he’d just hoped it could be over if he ignored it.

And so now he had a friend returned to him. But in pieces. How much of the Bucky he knew was in that broken mind? And how much of him was gone forever?

He clenched his fist. He would have given his soul to save Bucky from anything like this.

“Knock knock.” Tony Stark opened the locked door with the greatest of ease.

“Locked for a reason, Tony.”

“So you could be guilty and mope in private,” Tony said, tapping the side of his nose. “I’ve come to know you well, Cap, these last few months.”

“Well, if you had, you would have realized that I wouldn’t take an invasion of my privacy very well. Go away, Tony.”

“I don’t think I will. And the reason is this.” Tony sat down in the chair opposite Steve’s and crossed one leg over the other. “You got a gift. A fucking gift. If my parents came back tomorrow former brainwashed monsters I’d kiss the ground. You know why? Because I’d trust my folks to be strong. I’d trust the miraculous nature of human consciousness and I’d trust my friends.” He stood, the emotion in the air a little too close for comfort, and walked to the door.  “We’re going to figure out how to get your friend back, Cap. So put a little pep in your step and put a brave face on your friend. Go kiss Darcy and tell her that her rack looks good in the shirt she’s wearing today. Spoiler alert: it totally does. But don’t lock yourself up here and take responsibility for the bad decisions of a hundred other people and dozens of other nations. You were a kid. You were offered a chance to make something of yourself, and you took it. You couldn’t be expected to conceive of how it would change the world.”

“Whose responsibility was that, then?”

Tony shrugged. “Well, for one, my father’s. Erskine’s. The Senators that signed off on the project. That’s why they were paid the big bucks.”

“I don’t have to like it.”

Tony smiled. “No, you don’t. But you don’t have to let it consume you, either. You survived something... no one else could have. You can shake off a little emotional setback.”

“You are...” Steve shook his head. “Absolutely, one-hundred percent right. And that will be the only time I will ever say that. Ever.”

“That’s okay. I was recording this conversation. I’ll play it on repeat to help me sleep.” Tony winked, and whistled as he stepped out of the door.

**

“You’re the girl.” Bucky was looking a little dazed, on the other side of the glass. “The one with no sense of self-preservation.”

“I’m the girl you met yesterday, yes. It should be noted that you had a knife to my throat, and I’m not calling you names, so.”

Bucky closed his eyes and took a long deep breath in before he opened them again. “What do you want?”

Darcy shrugged. “I wanted to meet you.”

A twitch of amusement, just at the corners of his mouth. “Everyone wants something. That’s the name of the game. You don’t visit a crazed assassin just because you felt like it. Or because you wanted to satisfy some morbid curiosity. So. What took you downstairs yesterday, Darcy Lewis?”

“You remember my name.”

“Of course I do. I’m crazy, not stupid.”

“Arguable,” Steve’s voice said from the doorway. Darcy jumped. But Bucky, of course, had been perfectly aware of Steve’s presence the whole time. Or so it appeared. “On both counts. I’ve got some stories that would suggest otherwise.”

“I’d love to hear them,” Bucky drawled. “Only... wait. You’re not allowed to tell me because it might fracture my progress. Whatever the fuck that means.”

“Why don’t we start from the beginning, then?” Darcy said, stepping closer to Steve. “I wanted to meet you because Steve’s told me a lot about his friend Bucky. And I thought it might be nice for you to, you know. Know someone who didn’t know you before. Or,” she thought of Natasha, “after, for that matter.”

“Where did you find this girl? Jesus, Steve, you sure can pick ‘em.”

Steve reached for her and squeezed her wrist gently. “I saw her get thrown to the ground by a Russian assassin. And she got back up and took some more.”

“Always did like the ones with a bit of gumption,” Bucky said, and then went pale. “Oh... shit. Think I broke a block.”

And he passed out cold.

**

“It’s a failsafe mechanism,” the neuroscientist said to Steve and Darcy as they stood outside of Bucky’s cell, anxiously waiting for Bucky to regain consciousness. “It’s put in place by the people who wiped him. If he ever gets close to regaining a sense of who he is... his brain restarts. Like an operating system trying to shake off a virus.”

“So every time this happens -- every time we get some hope, his brain is going to erase whatever just happened. Like a deleted file.”

The SHIELD scientist shrugged. “That’s how it supposed to work. But honestly? The brain’s a tricky little animal. You may think you’ve got it trained, but it’s always working around itself. It wouldn’t surprise me if it functions exactly like it’s supposed to. But then, it wouldn’t surprise me if your friend woke up one day and it didn’t.”

**

Darcy had been fighting off a yawn for the last forty-five minutes, but she could no longer hold it back, and her interruption of the quiet finally caught Tony’s attention.

“Are you still here?” he reached for the glass of chlorophyll she’d placed at his work station an hour before. “Don’t you usually check out by now?”

“I had work to do,” Darcy said shortly. “Someone’s got to do your job since you’ve got a moral objection to it.”

Tony smirked. “Touche. Listen -- stop what you’re doing. Go back to your apartment and get some sleep, yeah?”

“You aren’t going to be sleeping.”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t really sleep when I’m working on a project. It’s a thing.”

“It’s a thing that’s going to kill you. I will go to sleep when you go to sleep. And that happens in the next thirty minutes, or I call Pepper, and there will be consequences.”

“You know, you’re not nearly as scary as you think you are.”

“Pulling up speed dial now.”

“Disabling cell access now...”

“JARVIS, override code 235 llama delta 6.”

The sound of a ringing cell phone filled the air.

“You... you traitor!” Tony shouted.

“JARVIS’s main programming function is to make your life better. Pepper, JARVIS and I all agreed your life would be better if you would do things like eat and sleep on a regular basis,” Darcy said.

“Hey, JARVIS, what’s up?” Pepper’s voice piped into the workshop.

“Sorry to bother you, Pepper, but Tony’s been up for twenty-six hours,” Darcy said, “I can’t seem to get him to put the welding gun down to go to bed.”

“Unfortunate,” Pepper said. “Well, thank you very much, Darcy. Tony, I’ll be calling you on your private number. Tell Darcy to go home and be safe on the way there.”

“Yes, mother,” Tony muttered under his breath.

“Men who mock their girlfriends do not get phone sex,” Pepper said.

Tony turned and parroted. “Darcy, go home and be safe on the way there. Pepper says.”

“Okay.” Confident that her boss’s well-being was in the right hands, Darcy waved to Tony and punched out.

She was texting as she left Avengers Tower.

Heading back to my apartment. Tony’s finally headed to bed and so am I. See you soon.

She hit send, and what happened next she would later blame on exhaustion and distraction. Someone grabbed her arm and yanked, attempting to pull her into an alley between two buildings. Darcy knew going into the alley would pretty much seal her fate, so she struggled as hard as she could.

The blow to the side of her head, she could do almost nothing to stop. It nearly rolled her eyes back in her head, but she was able to roll with it, and thanks to Natasha’s training, spotted the hypodermic needle in the hooded assailant’s hand. Going with her training -- to be as loud as obnoxious as possible -- Darcy let out a scream, and hit her panic button.

**


It was like it was raining SHIELD agents, Darcy thought ruefully, minutes later, as she was escorted to the back of an SUV and instructed to wait there for medical attention. Some kind person had found her an ice pack, and she pressed it to the side of her head, closing her eyes, until a medic came and gave her a once-over, pronounced her bruised but not broken, slipped her some pills, and then slipped away again.

“Ms. Lewis?”

Darcy opened her one eye. Agent Coulson stood in front of her, his hands clasped together. “Going to interrogate me already?”

“No, not right now, actually. Natasha has, uh... disabled the assailant. We’ll focus our attention on him first. I just thought it would be prudent to inform you that Mr. Stark is on his way.”

“Oh great, because there’s like, no possibility on Earth that he’ll overreact...”

“And Captain Rogers has been informed, too. He’s on his way, but he was in Brooklyn when your panic button went off. He’s been checking in every few minutes. Would you like me to put him through to you when he next calls?”

Darcy closed her eyes and swallowed, trying not to feel like a damsel in distress, but at the same acknowledging how reassuring it would be just to hear Steve’s voice right now. “Yes, please.”

“Lewis!” Tony Stark pushed through the barrier of agents surrounding the alley. “Didn’t I specifically instruct you not to get mugged or jumped on your way home tonight?”

“Must have left that out, Tony,” Darcy said, smiling despite herself.

“What do we know, Coulson?” Stark stuck his hands in his pockets and focused a surprisingly steely gaze at the agent, who didn’t seemed affected by it at all. Darcy idly wondered if gigantic balls of steel were part of the job requirements for SHIELD agents.

“We don’t know anything, but we have a lot of speculation,” Coulson said.

“I’ll take speculation if it’s from your people.”

“We suspect it was an ill-conceived, ill-formed plan of someone working with Lukin. They want their asset back. They would have traded Miss Lewis for him.”

“Whoa. What?” Darcy raised a hand. “What the fuck is going on here?”

The roar of a motorcycle engine cut off that train of thought, though, as Steve practically laid it over trying to get off of it fast enough to run towards her.

She would have gotten up to meet him halfway, but her head hurt like a bitch and she’d really been holding it together pretty well, all things considered. But Steve covered the ground between them just fine on his own, and when he finally had her in his arms, she relaxed. There was no place safer in New York.

Once he’d pressed a lingering kiss to her cheek (all the affection, aside from handholding, they were comfortable with showing in public, thanks to the paparazzi) and his eyes had swept from feet to head, looked for bumps and bruises, he too turned to Coulson.

The agent might have shifted his weight, slightly. The only indication he’d give that he was sweating.

“Agent Coulson, I don’t think I’m out of line to expect an explanation here,” Steve said, his voice calm. Too calm. In fact, he was handling this all a little too well. That meant there would be a ragestorm later, Darcy knew. She only hoped they gave her the good stuff so her head would survive whatever idiocy Steve would try.

“It’s like I was telling Stark. I don’t have a good one, yet,” Coulson said, “although I’ve got my very best people on it, and...”

“Here’s what we know,” Natasha Romanov said, coming from the other side of the van, her hips swaying in her black catsuit. Neither Steve nor Coulson looked surprised to see her there. Tony and Darcy both jumped. “We know Lukin knows where the Soldier is. We know that word of Darcy’s little encounter in the cell has gotten around SHIELD. We also know there’s a leak.”

“We think there’s a leak,” Coulson said.

“Really?” Natasha raised an eyebrow at him.

“For the purposes of this conversation, I’m okay with using ‘know’, however,” Coulson hedged.   

“We know there’s a leak. The man who attacked was pretty eager not to end up in Gitmo,” Natasha said, “so he’s leaking like a siv. And he’s naming Lukin Corp. as his employer.”

“Lukin. This is the guy that had Bucky on ice, right?” Steve asked.

“Yes,” Coulson said.

Tony rocked back on his heels. “Well. This just got interesting.”

“Steve?” Darcy hated the way her voice sounded right now. But she also hated how she felt -- so exposed and open and alone and she just wanted her bed and she wanted to sleep and she didn’t want to think about how she’d been reduced to one side of an equation in a war that had (practically) nothing to do with her.

“Want to go home?” he asked, his focus immediately on her.

“Yes, please.”

“I’m going with you,” he said firmly.

Darcy thought about putting up a token struggle. But that’s all it would be -- a token effort, and all she wanted was his arms around her and her own pillow and a good painkiller and eight solid hours of rest.

“Yes, please,” she said, and he wrapped her in his arms and Tony signaled one of his people, and they were quietly followed the remaining two blocks to her apartment.
**

Steve was quiet as he moved around her apartment while she slipped on pajamas. He steeped a cup of tea for her, and one for himself, and then moved into her bedroom, setting the mugs on her nightstand.

When she laid down, he settled down next to her, wrapping himself around her like a human blanket, good and solid and warm. And then he kissed her. Long and slow and deep. The kiss they’d denied themselves earlier, made more special because no one could see it but them.

Steve kissed her hand and tucked it in his own before he said anything. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

“I’m sure Coulson told you everything.”

Steve shrugged. “But he couldn’t tell me how you feel.”

Darcy breathed out a shuddery breath. “I feel like an idiot. I was an idiot. I let myself get distracted -- Natasha’s always railing on me to pay attention, I guess I should have been more aware, but... all I was thinking about was going home, you know? And laying down. And you getting back tonight. And I had my cell phone out, and that’s how he got the drop on me.”

“You’re not an idiot. Life is distracting. We can’t always be on all the time,” Steve said. “Not even Natasha Romanov.”

“Tony told me I might be a target. Natasha said I definitely would be. I just... shrugged them off, you know?”

“It’s easy to get complacent,” Steve said, after a pause. “To take your safety and those of your loved ones for granted. Even though everything in my experience told me differently, I always assumed your safety a given, too... like the universe owed me something, you know?” His grip tightened around her. Not uncomfortably so. “You scared me. When you hit that panic button and it went straight to my phone all I could think was I’ll never get there in time. I’m just glad you did most of the saving yourself, Darce. I’m... incredibly, stupidly proud of you. You’re still here and it’s because you’re incredible.”

Darcy felt tears well up in her eyes. “I don’t feel incredible.”

“Wait until you try these blue pills,” Steve said, kissing her forehead. “You won’t believe how incredible you’ll feel.”