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Home.
For a long time, Darcy Lewis had longed for home.
Now, Darcy had known her fair share of living spaces throughout the course of her life, but very few of them ever seemed anywhere near worthy of the title.
She had vague memories of the house she had shared with her parents, the typical two story house found in a friendly suburban subdivision. Darcy remembers the bright colors of her bedroom walls and the swing set out back where she broke her arm when she was four. She doesn’t remember much else about the house except that it was home, until suddenly, it wasn’t.
After her parents died, Darcy lived with her Maternal Grandmother. She had nearly eight years there before her grandmother passed on. Darcy can still close her eyes and picture every room. She can still hear the TV playing her Grandmother’s favorite soap operas, and the sound of her Grandmother singing at the piano. Darcy remembers lighting the candles at the window for Hanukah and the smell of Latkes frying on the stove. She can remember every inch of that house, a fact that brings her comfort as much as it brings her pain. To Darcy, that was the only real home she had ever had.
Darcy was passed around through a handful of foster homes after her grandmother passed, and while they were all nice families and nice houses, they weren’t hers and it wasn’t home.
A few dorm rooms and an apartment or two followed her time in Foster Care, but Darcy never really connected with any of her roommates and tended to spend most of her time at friends places or in the library during her time at Culver.
The small room that she had off of the lab in New Mexico was as close to home as Darcy had found. She didn’t know what she was doing half the time, but somehow, with Eric and Jane, she seemed to form a small family. Just as Darcy was beginning to believe that New Mexico could become home, Thor fell from the sky and the Destroyer came after him. After that, Darcy could hardly look at any spot in town that didn’t send her into flashbacks of the attack.
The room that she and Jane shared at her Mother’s flat in London was far too small to even really be considered a room, let alone home. Not to mention how many people they managed to cram into that apartment. Darcy loved Jane and Eric, but a girl needs her space sometimes.
Everything went up in the air when SHEILD fell and Hydra was exposed. In a panic, and not knowing how much of her research they had gotten their hands on, Jane had packed up everything and Thor had whisked them off to Asgard. Asgard was great and all, and Darcy was thankful that they were willing to take them in after everything that had gone down, but Asgard was too, well, alien, to ever be home.
Then the whole Ultron fiasco happened, and then Tony and Steve have the cat fights of all cat fights, and Darcy couldn’t believe how such smart men could be so stupid. Then as if a superhero Civil War wasn’t enough, Thanos had come to Earth and fought to control and then destroy the planet. Thor had left Darcy and Jane in Asgard during the battle, but he assured them when he returned weeks later, looking a little worse for wear, but relatively alright, that all of the avengers had survived, though Vision had been touch and go as they worked to re-establish his connection to the mind stone. Once that had all passed, Thor took them back to Earth, where they would all be moving into the Avengers facility in New York. Jane was being given full funding, and Darcy was promoted from unpaid intern to paid assistant.
Darcy managed Jane and slowly took over care for Tony and Bruce too, making sure that her Scientists Three were well feed and watered. She got to know the avengers more, learning self-defense from Natasha, baking with Wanda, and pulling epic pranks with Clint when he was in town. One by one, Darcy’s small, self-made family began to grow. For the first time since her Grandmother died, Darcy unpacked all of the boxes that housed her things and set about making her apartment home.
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Bucky Barnes had a very shaky memory of home.
It was slowly coming back to him with time, flashes of the house he grew up in, remembering when his parents brought Rebecca home from the hospital and how proud he was to be a big brother. He remembers the smell of his father’s tobacco pipe and his mother’s perfume.
He remembers a small apartment in Brooklyn. Two beds crammed into one bedroom, hardly any furniture in the main room. He remembers slumping down into a cheap couch after a long day of work, art supplies stacked haphazardly in one corner of the living room, and staying awake next to Steve as he slept, sharing a bed for warmth on cold drafty nights and to make sure the punk lived through the night and the most recent bought of pneumonia.
He might not know what pictures had hung on the walls, or recall what color the carpet was, but he knew that both places had been home.
With the War came the draft, and then Bucky was leaving the only place he had ever known for war and destruction. Then there was Hydra and the Howling commandos and before he knew it Bucky was falling. Soon after that, he wasn’t even Bucky anymore. Moving from one Hydra base to another, from mission onto cryo, Bucky couldn’t even remember home let alone have one.
There was one blissful interlude in the middle of everything, while he was out to loan with the Russians, like he was just some library book. The KGB left him out of cryo long enough for memories and personality to thaw out, and Bucky was a small fraction of himself again, even for the briefest moments. Bucky thought that maybe he had found home in those hidden hours with his beautiful red-headed trainee, but then they were discovered and made to forget each other.
Bucky will never admit it to anyone but his therapist, but he thinks it might have been a sense of home that hit him when he first saw Steve. He thinks that was what began to show the cracks in his programing, that there were some things that just can’t be completely wiped away. There was something about the tall, reckless blonde that stood in front of him and refused to fight him that reminded him of a smaller, thinner, but just as reckless blonde holding up his fists to any bully that dared to cross his path. As he dove into the Potomac and dragged the man to shore, “‘til the end of the line” reverberated n his mind, and Bucky used it as his anchor to himself.
Bucky didn’t know who he was, or even who the blonde was, even if he knew he knew him, so he ran. He avoided the law and the blonde both until he could figure out who he was. He moved every few weeks, not staying on one place too long to draw much attention to himself. Romania reminded him of home, reminded him of the scolding he would get from his mother when he was bad and the food that had been served at the table every night. It was there that Bucky began to become himself more and more. He would not have considered the dingy bare apartment to be home, but he still found himself sad to leave the place earlier than planned, especially under those circumstances.
Bucky knew that he was just going to cause Steve and his friends more grief as long as the triggers were active in his mind, so the decision to go under cryo again was easy for Buck to make. It was as they were saying their goodbyes that Bucky thought to ask Steve if he had found his home yet. Steve had shaken his head and explained that nothing had felt right yet in the 21st Century, but that he wasn’t giving up yet. Bucky had teased his friend about finding home with the cute blonde from the airport, but Steve had just rolled his eyes and gotten serious on him again.
After a few months in cryo and the help of one Charles Xavier, Bucky is free of all Hydra and KGB triggers. Bucky learns that while he was under some crazy stuff happened with a titan from outer space and in the long run the Avengers had made up and the Accords were no more. Tony had flown out to Wakanda to apologize to Bucky personally, which Bucky still didn’t understand, since he felt the man had every right to want to kill him. Regardless, Bucky was not one to look a gift hose in the mouth, so he too apologized and they began to move forward as team members. Steve and Bucky returned to the states and set up base at the Avengers Facility in New York.
After so long on his own, it took a while for Bucky to open up and talk to anyone other than Steve and occasionally Sam, but slowly Bucky grew more comfortable with the team and left the confines of his apartment on a regular basis. It was on a trip to the labs to have Stark look over his cybernetic arm that Bucky met Darcy Lewis. He couldn’t believe that Thor called a Dame like her his lightning sister and couldn’t believe that she had been living in the same building as him without him knowing. She was like one of the pin ups Steve used to draw for him before the war, all curves and red lips. Watching her sass Stark and push him out of his own lab in favor of a shower and sleep, Bucky noticed he liked what was coming out of her mouth as much as he liked her mouth itself. He laughs for the first time he can remember as she literally pushes Stark down the hall, and his heart skips a beat as she smirks over her shoulder at him and calls out a hasty introduction. A week later, when she meets him in the lobby dressed like sin for a night of dancing and dinner, Bucky begins to allow himself to dream of home once again.
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It is a year after their first date that both Bucky and Darcy realize what it is they have been building together this past year. They are at movie night with the rest of the Avengers, and cuddled together on the couch. Darcy is completely engrossed with the movie, but Bucky is too busy thinking about Darcy to pay a lick of attention to the movie. This year had not been easy by any means, and some days it was still an uphill struggle just to get through the day, but having Darcy by his side through the whole thing had made it all worth it. She made him want to be someone worthy of her love, and he worked every day to be that man and to show her how much he loved her back.
Feeling her eyes on him, he turned to find Darcy smiling softly at him. “Hey.” He whispered, returning the smile. “Hey. I love you.” She said it so straight forward and simple, and it still shot through him like an arrow. He leaned in to press his lips against hers and felt her smile grow under his lips. “Love you.” He returned as he broke the kiss and tucked her back under his arm again. They both tried to focus on the movie again, but failed. It was Darcy who threw the towel in first. “James…” She purred in his ear. “Take me home?” in the blink of an eye, Bucky was standing and had Darcy in his arms. She laughed as she called out their good night over his shoulder, but let him carry her to the elevator and then to their apartment.
Home. Bucky thought about the word as he held Darcy to him in the elevator. He thought about the apartment they had shared for nearly 6 months now, with pictures of them and their friends on the walls, and bright throw blankets covering the mismatched but comfortable furniture. Bucky thought of the closet that they had started out sharing, but was now overflowing with Darcy’s chunky sweaters, and of the shoe rack that he never remembered to put his shoes on partly because Darcy was adorable when she got frustrated with him that way. His thoughts drifted to his nightstand, the picture of his family and the picture of Darcy and himself at the beach framed on top, and of the small velvet box that sat in the drawer waiting for the right moment.
Darcy pressed a gentle kiss to the side of his neck as he carried her off of the elevator and to the door of their apartment. Bucky paused before opening the door, studying the girl in his arms, his girl, and the contents of the box in his nightstand. Bucky realized then, as he pressed his lips to hers in the doorway of their apartment that somewhere along the line, home had stopped being a place and had become a person. This person. Darcy.
Bucky realized that as long as she was with him, he was home.