Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jane doesn't let the All-New All-Different SHIELD help them pack up and move to the new facility. Jane doesn't trust easily and if it weren't for Thor she wouldn't be moving, full stop. But Thor insisted, in the stately, gentle way he speaks with Jane when it is something that matters, and she had agreed in the end.

Something was troubling Thor. It might be the lingering effects of the whammy that Wanda had placed on him, but Thor has been maudlin lately, focused on sheltering those he cares about. Consolidating, even, since Thor is trying to work his will on Erik now. Darcy thinks that it won't work. Erik is happy to work with them, consult, and hang out -- but is far more attached to his students these days. Which is probably better for him than, say, actively seeking out danger like Jane is prone to do.

Erik is, in many ways, a lot smarter than either Jane or Darcy. Letting the danger come to him is one of those ways.

Darcy and Jane pack everything into soft-cell component cases, taking care with every piece of equipment that Jane has built or adapted to do what she needs it to do. They are the only ones in the world that really have the access and capability to work on the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and its practical effects, the equipment is irreplaceable.

People, however, they can come and go. And while Jane and Darcy are going, Ian elected to stay in London. Which wasn’t unexpected. He’s a student himself, and couldn’t relocate while still in classes. If he had been farther along or even working on his own thesis, he might have gone with them. It’s a pity, he could almost keep up with Jane, and even better —he almost kept up with Darcy.

Ian had wrapped up his portion of the research and slipped out rather quietly. Jane had a discussion with him about responsible use of the knowledge and data he possessed, and what Culver still had rights to, what Jane was in the process of patenting. Many things, really, but some of it was on what exactly was his free and clear. Ian was smart, very smart and a little dopey and easily led around by the bit, but very smart and his own projects were his.

Of course, his own projects weren’t the only thing that left with him. Darcy had run a final sweep on the computers before shutting them down, and entire swathes of files had been downloaded on his final day. She leans back in her chair, running her hands down her face and through her hair. This is not what she had wanted to deal with before crossing an ocean. Nothing’s missing, it’s just copied. It’s supposed to be her thing, making sure the fidelity of the data is never in question and she dropped a ball somewhere.

But then again, it’s Ian. Ian, who heard a rumor that Jane Foster was in England and tracked them down, who worked just as hard as Darcy for probably less theoretical pay than Darcy had been getting at the time. Who was a sloppy kisser, but could pull an all-nighter four days in a row. Who was still texting Darcy like nothing had changed except their relationship status.

Darcy’s written and rewritten a half-dozen texts, all variations on what the hell, and what did you do, what do you need this for, but she can’t seem to send any of them. Nothing seems to be right, and any action she wants to take to fix this, investigate this just seems so daunting and insurmountable. Inter dimensional portals? Those are easy.

“Darcy!” Jane interrupts her line of anxiety-ridden thoughts, “Have you taken the computers offline yet? We need to get everything —“

“Right, right, I’m on it. Just another minute.” Whatever she does about Ian, it’s going to have to wait. She can think about it. Figure out her next steps. Tell Jane. It could just be Ian wanting a copy of the work he was doing. A douchey move, but it’s one she can almost understand.

It’s what she chooses to believe to get her through the long trip.

They fly commercial. “It’s first class?” Jane tries to tell her while stretching out. They flew coach to London, so the legroom is nice. “They talked about it, us moving in, how to do it smart.”

“Wouldn’t smart have been some fancy private plane or something. I heard Stark keeps a stripper pole in his. We could have taken turns entertaining each other.” Darcy grouses and groans.

“And a quintet would have been faster, but they wanted smart not fast. And smart was not elevating us to be larger targets than we already are. So commercial, first class. There’s a couple of agents in the plane, and the pilot is a friendly.”

“Still think you’d be impressive on a pole.” Jane stares back at her, a look that inspires Darcy not to shut up, but to think that yeah, Jane would probably be scary intimidating if they got her dancing. “Fine, I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.”

“That’ll be a first.” Jane mutters.

It’s a long flight. Darcy should, realistically speaking, not piss off her boss-friend before the plane even takes off. “Do you think there’s anyone famous on the plane?” she asks instead, and from there, keeps up a line of babble that lasts through take off and until Jane pointedly puts in her headphones.

The flight is long and boring, and Darcy’s going to be severely jet lagged, but they are met the airport with a private car. Darcy isn’t sure if the driver is from Stark or from SHIELD. Their funding is a bit nebulous at this point. Tax time is going to be real interesting, for certain. Jane refused to be either of their employees, but the money still comes to them.

Darcy doesn’t question some things. Jane’s ability to negotiate a contract is one of them.

Thor takes them on a tour when they arrive. It’s a speedy tour that mostly consists of their new lab and the hallways that lead to his room that he now shares with Jane. It ends at that door and Darcy still in the hallway, not even knowing where she’s supposed to go.

The walkway is cold and sterile, and she tries to find something, anything that will direct her to where she’s supposed to go. Because hell is waiting at the door while the lovebirds go at it. But it’s just a big empty hall that leads to another one —the whole facility is devoid of people, the walls waiting for enough activity to fill it.

Don’t some of the Avengers train here? Stark maintains his tower, sure, but there’s an entire team here. Why isn’t it bustling with people, support staff, a janitor for fuck’s sake.

It now seems suspiciously empty, like there’s something that’s going on, and she wanders back down towards the labs. When Thor brought them there at first, the staff was moving their equipment in. There were lab techs everywhere and now, nothing.

Except for a low, throbbing wail, and a thick accented woman’s voice saying, “This is not as easy as you want it to be. You must allow me time.”

Darcy walks towards the voice and the room it stems from. She might have to interrupt, but she could at least get her bearings. There’s bulletproof glass on the top half of the door, and when she looks in, she only sees three people. Steve Rogers is one, unmistakable for his height, standing — no, pacing -- nervously. The woman is young, about Darcy’s age with drawn, heavy eyes. She is sitting in a chair next to the other man, shoulders slumped over and to the side. His chest is heaving with effort, and it’s clear the noise was coming from him.

Then, with what looks to be herculean strength, he lifts his chest back up and leans against the back of the chair, “I got a little more. Let’s do it again.”

“Are you sure. We don’t have to do it all now, Buck, we don’t.” Steve says, almost pleading.

“Would you want to be half the man you are?” the man growls, his hair hanging in sweaty strings. “No? Then shut up and let the woman do her voodoo magic bullshit.”

“He doesn’t—“ Steve begins to say, the apology on his lips, and Darcy can’t stop watching. This is wrong, this is private, but it’s also very interesting.

Darcy is a woman of science now, and her curiosity gets the best of her sometimes.

“I am being very careful,” the woman smiles with just a hint of malice, “but do remember that this isn’t magic bullshit and I am messing with your brain.”

“Whatever I’ve got left is all yours, Wanda.” Buck says, which is a stupid name but it rubs against the grain of Darcy’s memory like rug burn. He turns his head to glare at Steve, “Ain’t got much untainted meat to work with up there. Don’t care if she burns me out Steve, at least it’s on my terms.” Well, whoever the guy is, he knows how to shut Captain America up.

Steve and Wanda share a look with each other, and with a deep breath something just happens. The air changes, almost feeling like the crackling sensation in the midst of a storm, a gathering of all the energy. Wanda’s hands glow and Darcy gasps, stepping forward towards the door. Wanda lays her hand against Buck’s cheek and runs the other through his hair, whispering to him. Steve kneels, his head bowed towards them and he struggles to keep his eyes on Buck.

His eyes are wide, his pupils blown and his face contorts into infinite sadness.

The swirl of energy pulls at Darcy, forcing her towards the door, which swings inwards and she falls through and crashes on the floor. Abruptly everything stops. Wanda drops her hands, Steve swivels on his knees and stands up with the full weight of being able to wreck anyone’s shit behind him.

“Sorry?” Darcy squeaks out, trying to pull herself upright. She landed on her wrist all funny, but it seems mostly intact. “I was just —“

“How did you get in here, the door was locked.” Steve asks with an impatient growl. “We cleared out the entire wing.”

“I —didn’t know that?”

“Get out!” he yells, verging on actual menace, and Darcy just about rolls out of the door but Buck’s voice stops her.

“Damn, is that any way to talk to a woman, asshole? Jesus, first you can’t talk to them and now you just yell at them. No wonder you can’t get a date,” Buck’s lips lift in the semblance of a smile, but it’s off just a little, like he’s trying it on.

Steve is going to get whiplash turning his head around, “Are you, you?”

“Am I me? No, I don’t think I’ll ever be the old me again. But everything’s all here again.” He’s still haunted, his voice trembles and stirs in the wake of pain and suffering, god whatever Wanda was doing sounded like torture, but he manages to find Darcy’s face and latch on, “It is a bit of a private moment though, can we make introductions later?”

“Are you lost, Miss Lewis?” Wanda says, her face washed out. Considering it feels like something passed through Darcy to bring her inside the room, she’s only a little creeped out that red hands knows her name. “I can help you find your way. But you, I will be back, do not stray far.” she addresses Steve and Buck —

Oh shit. Buck. Bucky. That’s who she’s looking at. Thor told them of Steve’s overreaching mission to find his shield brother. Darcy’s stuck on words and breathing and the sudden shine of the metal plates that make up Bucky’s arm clicking and moving into place. She hadn’t known he’d been found, hadn’t know that he was here.

“I’ll find you if I feel my brain start to crawl out of my ears,” Bucky assures her and Wanda stands up. Bucky reaches over and takes her hands, a desperate touch. “Thank you.”

Wanda smiles, a small pale thing, but it reaches her eyes and it’s kindness instead of pity. As she stands and walks over to Darcy, Darcy rocks herself upright and up to standing. Wanda escorts her out firmly, but before the door slams, she watches Steve tentatively step towards Bucky.

“I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean to interrupt you. I was going to our labs and there was screaming….” Darcy trails off and Wanda just gives her a look, “I didn’t think you’d know who I was. Is that part of your —“ Darcy waves her hands about.

“No. I just listened to Thor when he told us you were coming. But I may have opened the door.” Her smile is impish, and Darcy can’t help but laugh in return. Wanda does manage to help her find her own quarters, and they make a tentative plan for dinner if there’s not impromptu gathering. Which apparently tends to happen. But with today’s rather interesting development, which Darcy does not ask about, even though she’s burning to know more about what exactly Wanda was doing — it might be nice to make a backup plan. She gets the sense that Wanda is generally guarded and that the woman is making an effort to be open, and well, Darcy pays kindness back with kindness.

And Darcy’s rooms aren’t very large and she hadn’t wanted them to be. Her bags have been delivered, and Thor must have come through and stocked up her fridge. There’s standard issue flatware and plates, a few cheap pans. Enough to cook on if you aren’t picky. Darcy’s been living out of suitcases and vans for the past few years and a dorm room before that. Darcy isn’t picky. It’s little, but it’s four walls and space to call her own, Darcy is going to be just fine.

It's not that Darcy had expected to become best friends to the Avengers. She'd thought that at least that she'd be included more often alongside Jane, but that didn't seem to happen. Although, Steve had come down to the lab after she had gotten settled and apologized perfunctorily. He'd looked so sleep-deprived, the color gone from his face, and even his hair had looked drained. Darcy had accepted his meager apology, but hadn't seen him more than in passing since.

So she spends a little time with Thor and Jane. And sure, Wanda meets her for lunch every so often. Sometimes even with Vision as he learned more about the wonders of socializing rather than just observing it. But really, Darcy isn’t part of the Avengers crew. She’s a tag-along. But the other lab techs, the peons and minions of the base, they welcome her with open arms.

Darcy has learned a few things in her life: Always thank the cashier, never piss off the janitor, and make nice with the people who make the everyday decisions. And with Jane, she became that person, part lab goober and part gatekeeper, who can keep the bullshit off her radar so that Jane can do her work. It’s not exactly a thrilling job, except for the occasionally helping save the world bits.

The thing is, it’s often felt lonely — no one else really understood what that’s like, to have to go from motivating Jane to get up in the morning to hurriedly pulling plans together and working rapid shorthand — at least not without being massively trained to that kind of work. But here? It’s an unwritten part of the social contract, you will be needed at some point, no matter if all you do is just make sure that everyone who needs a desk has one.

You will be needed. You will be scared. You must not falter.

It’s a heavy code to live by when your every instinct says to run and hide, but Darcy doesn’t want to listen to those instincts. Those instincts may preserve your life, but this is where the adventure is.

It’s lunchtime, and Darcy’s playing at pretending she’s a lady who lunches with a couple of archivists. The research team they support are working with some alien (not Asgardian, not anything Darcy’s seen) artifacts that were found. They are beautiful and they glow brightly, pulsing with the breath of the person handling the deceptively delicate strings connecting two tablets.

“Because that’s not creepy at all,” Darcy says in response.

“It’s very creepy actually,” Helena answers with a giant grin, the natural curls of her hair bouncing in time with a giggle, “But it’s not like you can stop breathing. It’s actually very soothing.” But Helena goes still and quiet as a shadow creeps over Darcy, and she can feel who the person who stands behind her even before he speaks.

“Miss Lewis?” Steve looks shy and hesitant when Darcy turns around to face him, “Thor and Jane wanted me to let you know that they are hosting people in their quarters tonight.”

Well why didn’t they just text her then? Thor and Jane have a wonderfully epic set of rooms, apparently built to Thor’s specifications. You can take the Prince from his court but you’ll never get the royal out of him. “Okay.” Darcy says, a little confused, “I’ll come and hang out tonight then.”

“Can I speak to you for a moment?” Steve asks, and the minion lunch crew looks affronted. They are not impressed by an Avenger asking to speak to Darcy alone and they really aren’t about to move from their favorite cafeteria table even for Captain America.

“Yeah, of course,” she replies and swings her legs around to stand up, “ I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t touch my food.”

Steve leads her off to a smaller table in the cafeteria, but he doesn’t sit down. He doesn’t make himself comfortable, so Darcy doesn’t either. “Look, tonight isn’t a really big deal, so don’t feel pressured to come….”

“I’m starting to get the distinct impression that you don’t like me Rogers. You yell at me, avoid me, and now issue, then try to take back an invitation to my boss and my friend’s own party?”

Steve inhales with sharp sound and swallows before hanging his head, “Yeah, I am royally screwing this up aren’t I? I’m sorry for when we met. It wasn’t a good time.”

“Apology accepted,” Darcy says.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. I don’t hold grudges, I just needed to know you honestly thought about it. What’s up with tonight? Why don’t you want me to come?”

“It’s not that I don’t —it’s Bucky. It’s the first time he’s expressed an interest in interacting with more than one or two people at once. I just don’t want to overwhelm him with too many people he hasn’t really met yet.”

There’s a but in that statement, and Darcy motions for Steve to continue.

“He asked about you, about why that pretty girl who fell through the door hadn’t been around. He may have asked if I had scared you off.” He looks fond, and his voice softens into a light chuckle. “I might be being a little overprotective.”

“Just a bit. I doubt I’ll ruin his day, but if he’s asking about me —“

“It’s a good thing, it’s a good thing. He’s distant, but he’s always been a social fella. This is good.” Steve reassures himself, “I’ll see you tonight.”

Darcy lets him walk away first before she rolls her eyes and lets her bemusement show. Because that was weird. And Darcy knows weird like the back of her hand. Weird walks through her door all the time. Steve Rogers, overprotective grandpa, is weird.

“What was that about?” Helena asks, and this is what Darcy loves about the tech crew. They aren’t cowed by Captain America at their table, that’s just daily life at the Avengers Compound. Wilson could fly in here and talk to the bluebirds outside and no one would even blink. They just want gossip.

Darcy doesn’t know how much of it is hers to tell though. Telling other people about James Barnes doesn’t feel right, and she hasn’t listened to enough of the rumor mill to get a grasp on what is the going story, or if they even know he’s here. “I barged in on him the other day during a training session and he scary yelled at me. He was apologizing for having a short fuse,” Darcy answers. Close enough for government work.

“Some people are just touchy about their treadmill time,” Helena shrugs and lets the table know she has to get back to her computer and most of the rest follow.

Darcy pokes at her food a little more. She can’t really get the mental image of Bucky, head hung low, his breathing desperate and wild, and then his eyes opening and bursting with clarity and sorrow, out of her mind. He thought about her. He remembers her from that moment. Probably as an afterthought, a way to connect with his friend, but there’s still something in her that’s pleased that for once, she’s memorable enough to count.

Chapter Text

Jane looks out of place in her own quarters, but not uncomfortably so. Darcy has been inspecting the sofa in the living room for a good half hour now (the left seat is optimal in terms of comfort. The cushion has just the right amount of fluff and the springs are giving up just the right amount of ghost from Thor’s weight) and Darcy melts right in to observe the party as it goes into full swing. There is little in the apartment that is built for Jane’s stature, it’s all sized to Thor. The plates are massive, the coffee table wouldn’t have been out of place in the kitchen of Darcy’s college apartment, and even the throw blanket might as well be a comforter. It was all entirely built with Thor in mind and Jane is dwarfed by it.

Jane isn’t fragile, she doesn’t break and hardly even bends. Backbone of iron, stubbornness running through her blood. But she isn’t a large woman, and while she moves about the rooms with sureness, it’s not a world with her in mind. Darcy can’t stop watching her, and if it was anyone but Jane, it would probably seem creepy.

“Is there something on my shirt?” Jane asks, “I’m fairly certain this was clean before lunch, and you didn’t get me anything that dripped.”

Darcy shakes her head, “No, I just — how do you put up with it? You have to stand on your tip toes to open the cabinets in the kitchen.”

“I have a stool, actually. The only place that actually fit me the way I liked it was the RV. I can’t live in that forever.” Jane answers as she slides in next to Darcy on the couch, and leans her head on Darcy’s shoulder, “Or so some people keep telling me. Like you, “Jane mimics Darcy’s voice, “Jane, if you want me to stick around, can we please find somewhere with real beds. I’m going to fall out of this thing someday!”

Jane doesn’t do her voice well at all, and it comes out as an amalgamation of Valley Girl and and a southern drawl, neither of which Darcy does. But it sends them both into hopeless giggles and from across the room, Thor is beaming at them. His eyes crinkle and brighten whenever he sees Jane laugh.

“So why are you being a couch potato? You are the one usually dragging me out by the teeth.”

“I’m evaluating,” Darcy sniffs, and that clearly is not what she’s doing, but Jane’s a bro, she’ll look past the lie. She does have to substantiate that though, “Wanda and Vision are doing some android/spooky lady version of flirting over by the window, and I do not have the heart to break that up over there. Rhodey is far too competitive at Mario Kart for me to even attempt to play with him and Sam and Natasha.”

“And Thor is over with Steve and Bucky. You can start there.” Jane says with sugary sweetness and a set to her eyes that says Darcy is not getting away with shit tonight.

Darcy doesn’t start there, Darcy is leagues away from starting there, so she starts by sitting between Sam and Rhodey and making smart ass remarks about their ability to do anything in a straight line, “They let you fly planes? They let you fly yourselves in little suits?”

“I will fly you right out of a window if you can’t do better than this,” Sam says.

“Wait, is that the reward or if I suck? Because it really sounds like I am going to win either way.” Darcy is terrible at video games, and she’s entirely more bark than bite. It serves it’s purpose however, and that’s to get her warmed up and remember how being around people makes her feel good and a little bubbly inside of her chest. Darcy’s almost forgotten that feeling, being so used to the small groups she’s worked in for the past few years, which has admittedly formed the basis of her social group.

She calls Thor over to play, and she can at least beat him soundly. But her eyes follow Bucky as he wanders the room. He’s not aimless, he’s making rounds, trying to spend a few minutes with everyone. He’s cleaned himself up — his hair is still long, but it’s trimmed nicely, he’s shaved so close to the skin that there’s not even a chance he’ll grow a hipster beard. He’s only in a t-shirt and jeans, but they do so much for him, since he’s probably the kind of guy that could pull off a sack.

And he’s utterly terrified, and every time Steve stands too close, hovers around him like he’s a newborn babe, Darcy can see his jawline tense and throb. It’s remarkable how much like a shadow Steve is being, and an interactive one at that. Darcy knows the stories that they tell about Captain America and his childhood friend; inseparable, devoted, and loyal — but she thinks that loyalty may be a little much for Bucky right now. Bless Steve’s beautiful heart, but body language just might not be his thing.

Darcy slips off the couch, setting the controller on the coffee table for the next person — let Vision trounce everyone’s asses or something, Darcy has a mission of her own. Operation: Give the Man Some Space. There are two options, move Steve away or winnow Bucky out of Steve’s bubble of mother-henning. This would be easier with a partner, but Darcy can improvise.

“Hey, I know you, you look way better when you aren’t being traumatized by Wanda. Or was that de-traumatized. Recognizing your trauma?” Darcy asks placing herself like a battering ram in the tiny amount of space between Steve and Bucky.

His face is a mixture of sweet and confused but he answered, “No I’m in full possession of all my trauma. All right up in my head for me to access whenever I don’t want it to.”

“Buck—“ Steve starts, spewing compassion and concern but Darcy interrupts.

“I know what you mean. Like, when you lay down to sleep? My head starts wondering about things like what if the destroyer actually succeeded in killing Thor? Would that have been the end of the destruction or just the beginning? What exactly are the long term effects of having that Aether shit inhabiting Jane’s body? Am I going to be able to help?” It’s inane babble, but it’s working, Bucky’s shoulders loosen from where they were almost permanently attached to his ears. She looks up at Steve (and up, because wow, all these men are so tall) and asks, “Hey, I think I left some lemonade in the fridge. Can you check for me?”

“Darcy, I —“

“Steve, I know your ma didn’t raise you in a barn, just go look.” Buck needles and relaxes as Steve looks at him hard and then walks to the kitchen.

“You looked a little cramped for space,” Darcy says, taking a step away from Bucky. Room to breathe for both of them.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, “He’s…making up for lost time I think. I think I can hear him complaining about how I mother-henned him when he got sick when we lived together and I —“ he shakes his head, “Nevermind.”

“I heard you wanted to meet me?” Darcy asks, aware that it wasn’t going to take Steve all that long to find the lemonade and pour her a glass.

“I just didn’t see you again and there’s not that many people around this building. I don’t put it past SHIELD — any form of it — to remove a person who has seen too much.”

Darcy leans in with a smile, “They can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m with Jane and she’s with Thor, and he’s not the sort of person that you cross without reason. Neither am I.” She gives a toothy grin and dissolves into a slow giggle, throwing her head back. Bucky smiles at her, real and genuine, the best she’s seen from him all night. “I won’t be a stranger though. Where are they keeping you busy?”

Bucky doesn’t get the chance to respond, because Steve comes back, balancing three glasses in his obscenely large hands. “I’m around,” he says, taking a glass from Steve and handing it to Darcy before taking another for himself.

“So am I.”

Steve looks as proud as Darcy’s mother did when she graduated from college. Which is a relief, and such a different change of pace from his slightly anxious, vigilant but caring expression. It still feels patronizing, though maybe this isn’t Steve just being overly cautious. Maybe there is a reason that he feels the need to escort Bucky around and it’s just not something Darcy is privy to.

Darcy almost hopes that’s the case; but also not. Wishing anything resembling a hardship on Barnes seems so wrong. He has so many already.

Jane keeps a lot of paper around since she more or less scrapbooks her notes. It’s a habit she formed early, Jane had told Darcy, to keep her from getting bored in classes in high school. She grasped things quickly, but had problems with memorization, so she wrote and rewrote, reorganized and connected the dots while the teachers worked with students who weren’t a quiet, nerdy and small Jane Foster. And it just stuck through college and grad school. It became an exercise in mapping out her brain, pouring it onto paper and into something hard and concrete.

When it was just Jane and Darcy, Darcy did more of the lab work. But now Jane has a small staff, and while Darcy is the most trusted person in the room to Jane, she functions more as life coach, not lab assistant. But it does mean that Darcy, who Jane trusts beyond measure, is still the one that takes the scrapbooked notes and digitizes them.

She’s working on a beautiful spread that Jane did of her latest thoughts on the sub-atomic makeup of the physical manifestation of the Einstein-Rosen bridge when her computer starts dinging. And dinging. Darcy tries to remember which alarm that is, knows it’s important. She doesn’t set alarms for unimportant things. Gliding her chair over to her computer, the pit inside her stomach starts burrowing deeper, seeping anxiety through her body.

The burrowing stops and then just drops as she pulls up the alerts. She’d set search terms with key points and some esoteric phrases of Jane’s research long ago, mostly just to see if anyone else was working with the ideas. Most of the time, when she gets hits, it’s students plagiarizing Jane’s known work, and the occasional person that just happened to put words in the right order. Monkey on typewriters, that sort of thing.

This isn’t that. This isn’t that at all. The search result doesn’t come from turnitin or anything like that. It’s not from published work. It’s from the last set of data before they moved, from one of Jane’s notebooks. And it’s buried in the deep web.

“Oh shit,” Darcy says, her jaw tensing. She just can’t figure out what is going on with the data. She’s good at getting into places where she shouldn’t, but making sense of all the pieces goes beyond her ability. To get down to the bottom of this, she’s going to need to learn new languages, new sets of codes, new ways to organize her brain. The data keeps going. The alarms keep going off until she finally shuts off the notifications. “Ian, what did you do?”

Why did she wait? It’s been a few weeks now, she should have sent a message to him, or told Jane, or someone. She’s got to figure this out, and figure it out soon. She could easily go to Natasha, or anyone else that specializes in intelligence gathering — but this was all in her hands before, and she wants to keep as much control as possible. Giving it to SHIELD or the Avengers is an immediate way for it to no longer be in her hands.

She’s not going to wait until she has a solution, but Darcy does need to know more before she hands it off to the big guns. A little gun though, that she could use, someone with resources and different connections. She whips out her phone and sends a quick text message hey helena wanna go out for lunch. My treat :)

Raincheck for tomorrow? Too much shit not enough brains in attendance today.

Darcy can work with tomorrow. That shouldn’t be too late to start this.

She doesn’t even get to tomorrow without another wrench in her plans. Jane’s called out to do a little fieldwork and neglects to inform Darcy of the change in plans. It’s nothing all that new, Jane doesn’t always take Darcy with her when it’s the more involved work, rather than the drive around and take readings work. Jane gets a SHIELD escort and takes a lab tech and just goes and follows her dreams.

Darcy gets a frantic Steve Rogers in the lab. Which is not a typical occurrence for anyone.

“Can you come with me? We have a …thing and Bucky had …a different thing.” Steve says, almost begrudgingly and Darcy grabs her bag and follows.

A few minutes later, she’s led into what has to be the set of rooms that Steve and Bucky share. Steve explains that Bucky is sort of in a 95/5 split right now. Ninety-five percent of the time, Bucky is good. He’s well on the road of recovery, and that while things aren’t perfected, he’s adjusting.

Five percent of the time, he’s not as good. Which considering he has decades of abuse, brainwashing and worse, is really quite remarkable and a testament to the incredible flexibility and durability of the human mind, not to mention Barnes’s own natural resilience. He’d had a panic attack, a bad one, and Steve doesn’t want him to be completely alone as he recovers from it.

“He goes a little too far into himself,” Steve says before he leaves, shield in his hand, “Don’t expect him to talk,” Darcy starts to shove the man through the door. Steve needs to go. Steve needs to stop hovering and let Barnes do his own thing. But mostly, this is an assemble call, and Steve needs to go. “I think….” Darcy closes the door so that Steve actually leaves. She’ll probably hear all sorts of guff about that later.

Darcy avoids Barnes for a little while, busies herself in the kitchen. If she’s going to have to Bucky-sit, she’s at least going to make some coffee. Steve has some really good beans alongside a large container of ground instant motor oil, and she wonders who who drinks which. Darcy makes a pot of the good stuff since she can always make the other later. But eventually the silence wears on her and she has to say something in this big open space, or she’s going to start feeling entirely creeped out.

“I don’t really know what they expect me to do.” Darcy says to the expressionless man sitting —no, melted into the soft cushions of the couch. She sets down a cup of coffee in front of him. She doesn’t know how Barnes takes it, but he can ask if he wants something. According to Steve, that’s something he knows how to do. He can ask for something if he wants it when he’s like this.

Steve also assured Darcy that none of the Winter Soldier programming remains, that he doesn’t lash out in violence like a scared dog. He’s acclimating to the freedom of being able to direct his own thoughts and he finds other people to be comforting. At least in small numbers.

“Steve kinda just shoved me in here when the assemble call came in,” Darcy continues, “We’ve met by the way. Darcy Lewis? It was at that thing of Thor’s where he — never mind, doesn’t matter. And then before, of course, there was that time when Wanda was mind melding you back together. You don’t need to introduce yourself, I know who you are.”

That’s practically a smile on Barnes’s face. Or maybe it was just a twitch. Whatever.

“Okay, seriously, I haven’t had to carry this much of the conversation since my little sister learned to talk. You think I’m bad, Becky is the worst.”

Now this actually is a smile, “I had a sister named Becca. Rebecca.”

“So we have something in common, sisters named Rebecca. Did she love carrots so much she tried to replant them so she could get more, too?”

“No, but I had a lot of sisters,” Barnes is stuck somewhere: not quite far away but not really present either. It’s such a fierce and confused longing, that Darcy find herself lost in it too, “Three little sisters, two brothers. All younger. I haven’t even thought of them yet.”

“I’m the oldest of five. Youngest is Jacob, he’s just five. My parents dropped me off at college with, ‘by the way, there’s another kid coming.’ I really hope my mother is done soon.”

“I wonder what happened to them.” Bucky says, his eyes growing wide, wistful and a little scared, “Do you think any of them could be alive?”

“Do you,” Darcy pauses — this could be a big problem, no matter what she says here. If they are dead, Barnes has more to mourn. If they are alive, it’s a different type of mourning and decisions to make, “Do you want to find out?”

“Yes.” he says with certainty, “I miss them. I need to know.”

Darcy takes the tablet she carries out of her bag, “Then let’s get started.”

Chapter Text

They start on paper. Most people looking up their family tree are trying to look back, not many are great-granduncles looking for relatives. It should make it easier to find people, or at least find basic information. Bucky lays out on paper boxes for each of his brothers and sisters, when they were born. Some were born in hospitals, some were not. He wasn’t, but he was the oldest and wasn’t planned. He was a child of a hasty marriage and there hadn’t been prospects for his father at that time.

Some of the boxes stop too short. His youngest brother, Charlie, drafted into Korea and dead before his nineteenth birthday. Alice passed of cancer not long after but had two sons. Darcy circles their names as she fills out the branch of the tree. “Maybe we can find them.” She says, when she notices just how sad Bucky looks already. Oldest of six. Oldest of four.

Ruth, his oldest sister, three years younger and the problem child, didn’t have children. Darcy finds her easily. Ruth Barnes was an artist, who spoke often about her dead brothers, about Steve, and who painted scathing anti-war works and was blacklisted as a communist in the fifties. Darcy and Bucky pour over her wikipedia page together, thighs touching and heads bent over the tablet together. Ruthie lived her life in fury for cause after cause. After she died, her long-time partner Miriam would read poetry at her gravesite.

“It’s fitting, really. She loved Stevie, you know. When we were all young, we’d draw together with whatever we could find about. I can’t wait to tell him about Ruthie. Steve’s going to get such a kick out of my little sister never backing down.” Bucky says it with a grin but he keeps looking at the two other boxes they haven’t filled out yet.

The door opens and Bucky and Darcy sit back, as if they were doing something illicit.

Steve looks... Well he looks exhausted. And sticky. A thin layer of goop is screwing up his hair something fierce, and shimmers on the arms and chest of his uniform. Darcy imagines that his face is clear only because he hastily wiped it off. Dried clumps stick in balls near his hairline and ears, and on the hair of his arms. Like rubber cement, just worse.

Bucky raises his eyebrows, pressing his lips together, and his eyes brighten.

Steve raises a finger, "Don't even start."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Bucky humors Steve by not laughing out loud, but the truth of his feelings is written all over his expressive face.

"They don't have a locker room for you to clean up in?" Darcy asks, doing a much better job of just looking concerned.

"I uh, forgot to bring a change of clothes.” Steve looks down at himself, “I’m going to wash up. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Darcy watches him go into his room, and hears the shower start running. “Think all the Avengers got stuck together? Because I would pay some serious money to see Sam and Steve glued together.”

“If they did, do you think someone got video?” Bucky questions.

“It’s 2015, of course someone got video,” Darcy answers.

“Do you think … I’d like to finish this later.” Bucky’s eyes dart over towards Steve’s room, “I think the loss of time hits Steve harder. Seeing an entire family….” Bucky trails off.

Darcy doesn’t quite understand, but then, she doesn’t have to. She just has to want to, “Sure, sure. Let me know when you can throw off your ghost and we can find out what happened to Becca and….?”

“Edward. Eddie Russell Barnes.” Bucky smiles, “Hated baseball, always hiding in his textbooks, and taller than a weed, Eddie.” Bucky looks far off, his jaw tensing with memory and then relaxes into a light, unforced smile, “Thank you Darcy.”

“No problem, Barnes. You’ve got a kickass family, I’m happy to learn about them.” He’s leaned towards her again, and she’s noticed he has an unconscious tendency to flirt, but he looks at her almost like he means it. His mouth opens and closes, his lips parting and meeting. Darcy doesn’t want to get the wrong impression, some men just flirt like a river flows after all. Doesn’t mean a thing, “I think Ruthie might stay my favorite though. That woman had ovaries made of steel.”

“What are you talking about?” Steve asks, his hair wet, dressed in a pair of sweats and a t-shirt. Steve is never going to win a best-dressed list on his own, because while everything looks good on the man, Steve tends towards the unadorned and basic. He doesn’t want to raise a fuss about himself, tries to make himself boring enough not to be noticed.

“Ruthie.” Bucky grins, “She has a wikipedia page, Steve. My little sister took on the world.” Steve reacts with doubt, “Really Steve, you’d be proud of her.”

“I should get some sleep,” Darcy says as Steve eyes just how close she and Bucky are together. Steve blinks and he looks uncertain at the lack of space. Darcy’s tired of the eggshells she has to tiptoe around with Steve. “Walk me to my room, Steve?”

Steve agrees, and after he finds shoes and she gathers her things, they walk down the endlessly grey hallways together. Darcy bides her time and gathers her will to speak up, “If you aren’t careful, you are going to lose your friend again.” It’s blunt, but she’s good with blunt. What’s the point of wrapping this up with pretty words?

“Excuse me?” Except that it’s Steve Rogers, who has never turned down an offered fight, so of course he takes the bluntness as bait. “I don’t know where you get off —“

“Please listen to me,” Darcy turns in front of Steve, grabbing his arm to make him stop. “How long has it been since you left Bucky completely alone? Without anyone to watch over him? I get that you’ve always been attached at the hip, but right now, you’ve glued yourself to his back. You have him back, but he needs breathing room.”

“Darcy, I’m just trying to help him adjust.”

“I know. I don’t think you’ve ever meant anything but the best by wanting to be by his side through this, but just be his friend rather than a nursemaid.”

Steve stares her down for a moment, and then steps back to lean against the wall, “I’m trying to do the right thing, Lewis. What they didn’t do for me when they woke me up. I had nothing to connect with, no one that understood. I want Bucky to know that I do understand and that he’s not alone.”

“But you don’t understand. You can’t. No one here or anywhere is going to completely understand what he’s gone through. He’s doing amazingly well for someone that just had his brain whammied back together with magic. Magic, Rogers. You don’t know what that’s like. Just, ease off a little. Trust that we can all keep an eye on him, and trust that he’ll seek someone out to talk to if he needs it.”

“Including you?” Steve says with the merest chance of something that could be a smile. He eases into what she’s said a little, some of the stubborn washing away when he closes his eyes and pushes himself off the wall.

“If he wants to hang out with me, he’s welcome to it. I’ll make a place for him at the sidekicks table in the lunchroom.”

Steve chuckles and they walk the last little hall down to her room, “You know it’s funny. I was always the sidekick. There goes James Barnes and that trouble that follows him around. And now history….”

“History is unfair to everyone, but mostly, it’s unfair to the truth,” Darcy says. “Have a good night Steve.”

“Thank you Darcy, for tonight. For both of us.” It feels like a victory, a win, something that Darcy has accomplished. Take on the famed will of Steve Rogers and not back down, and get him to concede — even if not in words. She’ll take it. She’ll take the win.

Darcy fidgets, drumming her fingers against her leg because it’s quieter than against the table, as Helena looks over her laptop with a deepening furrow to her brow. It just keeps growing, both the furrow and the files and information that were —are Jane’s work, leaking all over the dark web.

“This is bigger than you and me, Lewis,” Helena finally says, pushing the laptop away. “Like, is your ex-boyfriend even still alive type of big.”

“He responded to a text I sent him a couple days ago. Just as if nothing happened.” Darcy replies, “Well, mostly. It was stilted even for a text.” Darcy’s pretty sure it was still Ian. He had a tendency towards awkward in any medium.

“You should go to someone with this, or even just tell Foster. She’s not going to be upset.”

The hell she’s going to be upset. The data wasn’t ready yet. She was writing papers that would win a Nobel and open up new theories of the universe. Game changing. And now someone else has it and Darcy needs to know who. “I will, I will. I just — Helena, I just need to go to them with something. Just a lead, at the very least.” It’s not smart, Darcy knows this, but if she can just have a little something to go on, maybe she won’t feel as inept as she does any longer.

It’s all Darcy’s fault. She didn’t press Ian about it. She didn’t take her safeguards. So she has to be the one to make it right.

“Just a week?” Darcy asks, putting as much charm as she can into the words, into her smile.

Helena must see something, probably the desperation in her eyes, “A week. But we are monitoring it, and if something big happens, I will take it to Romanov.” Darcy’s nearly forgotten that Helena was SHIELD. Is SHIELD. Is whatever it is now. So many of the low-levels got eaten up by Stark and quietly reprocessed back into support roles that they all seem to be in limbo as to their employer.

Darcy doesn’t have much, but what she does have is on the line. It’s not like she’s one of the lab techs and researchers that Jane now has. She’s a friend who has gotten lucky. But if she doesn’t pull her weight, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Four years. She has her degree but Jane’s been her world for four years now.

She shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts. That’s not a good road to go down. Thoughts,like racehorses, only lead to …well, there’s a metaphor somewhere that probably ends with a poor, injured creature getting shot. It’s not a good metaphor at all.

Helena turns the laptop towards her, and she straightens her back, and her lips raise with the satisfaction of the challenge, “I can group things together, but I am going to need your help for analysis. Is Foster’s original research on this laptop?” She barely waits for Darcy to nod back before her fingers start flying, “We need to figure out what’s important, and how they got ahold of it. Call Ian. Don’t text him, don’t email him. Call him while I start comparing the files.”

Helena pushes Darcy’s phone, which she had left out on the table, towards her. It looms. How can a little piece of technology loom? But she sighs and picks it, the weight overbearing in her hands. She scrolls through her recent contacts and calls Ian.

It rings and rings. And rings. Darcy’s anxiety over the entire situation mutates and turns into apprehension and concern. Ian actually uses his voicemail. He screens his calls when he’s working, but it’s not even tipping over right now.

“Set yourself a reminder and try later.” Helena mumbles.

Darcy calls again right away. Maybe the signal was bad. After what seems like a lifetime, but is in fact, just a six rings, Ian does pick up.

“Darcy this isn’t really a good time.” Ian titters with more than just his normal nerves.

“Are you alone?” Darcy asks, concern rolling through her, even her teeth tensing.

“No, no, I don’t know where you packed the duct tape. Weren’t you using that to pack everything up anyways?” Ian isn’t exceptionally good at subterfuge, but he’s trying. His voice is shaky but he slows down to a normal speed by the end of the sentence.

“Ian, keep going. Are you hurt? Where are you? Who has you?” she should be trying to keep him on the line as long as possible, even if they can’t track anything, but she can’t curb the questions.

“You decided to leave the first aid kit in London, since a lot of it was used up,” He pauses, as if he’s listening to her speak, “Yeah, yeah, I don’t know. My advisor wasn’t a lot of help there. Beckman? You remember him right? He’ll know. Look, Darce, I have to go.” The call drops with a terrifying thump and silence.

Darcy stares down at her phone screen. This is now a whole new layer to deal with. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth. Helena tilts her head and her nostrils flare, her lips thinning in a line.

“That did not sound good.”

“No. Ian’s hurt and someone has him. He doesn’t know who. He gave me a contact though.’ Darcy looks up.

Helena closes the laptop, “Okay then. Let’s find Romanov.”

“What?” Darcy nearly yells, but stops herself just in time, so that they don’t draw too much attention to themselves. There’s no one else really around, but there’s enough people in the building that you are never truly alone.

“I said I’d keep it to myself for a week, unless it got worse. Your friend is hurt and is at best, being extorted and is likely in someone else’s custody. This isn’t about data anymore, there’s a person involved. Textbook definition of worse.”

Tightness in Darcy’s chest curls around her heart, and her breath cuts off. Everyone will know that she’s inept at the one thing she’s supposed to do, help Jane. Keep her work secure. Be trustworthy. She’s failed. “But….” She falters and Helena cuts her off.

“No, no quarter given Darcy, we need to help Ian now before anything else.”

Helena’s right. But it doesn’t make Darcy feel any better. But she needs to think of Ian first, not herself. She can always find a new job and start her life over again. If she doesn’t act fast, Ian might not have that option.

“Okay,” she says, her voice and hands shaking, “Let’s go find her.”

Chapter Text

Darcy really hates the fucking hallways. They seem to get longer and greyer and more tedious the less she wants to travel down them. Walking down to where Romanov tends to chill when she’s not out on a mission, or helping Rogers train the new Avengers or - and this seems like a weird rumor so it must be true - babysitting Barton’s kids on his farm, causes her breath and her footsteps to falter out of synch.

It doesn’t help that Helena has changed. When she walks, she gets more hurried and confident. Darcy can see humble Stark researcher fade and the SHIELD researcher who might not be trained to kill you but certainly capable of some sort of harm return. It’s terrifying. Has Helena just been hiding as a minion this whole time? That is seriously unfair. The rest of them don’t have a chance at being that cool. Unless, of course, the rest of the lunch table are also secretly terrifying people just a catsuit away from ninjahood.

“Oh relax,” Helena says, same as she has been the entire time Darcy’s known her, like nothing has changed between them, “No one is going to kill you.”

“No, I’m just going to have to explain myself and Jane is going to find out and….” Darcy cuts herself off because it’s just too depressing to think about. She should start packing, call her parents and see if she can watch the brats in return for room and board. It’s election time, there’s bound to be some candidate out there that would love her degree and what few connections she has to the caped community.

Helena stops her short, and Darcy trips over herself, “Get over yourself, Darcy. You made an easy mistake but you were about to make a worse one. You are worried about yourself, fine, but swallow it so that someone with more skill than either of us can find Ian. The data doesn’t matter anymore.”

Lie. Of course it does. The data is priceless, but it doesn’t trump a living person. Darcy swallows as directed, her throat dry and coarse, but it’s freeing. Whatever happens to her is not worse than what happened to Ian. But it’s the right lie, the lie that brings her still and allows her will to focus. There is work to be done, and if there is one thing Darcy knows how to do, it’s work.

Natasha greets them with unabashed curiosity. Darcy’s always seen Natasha as rather nonplussed, so in tune with the reality of the world that nothing really phases her. But that’s not true, not really. Natasha is interested as Darcy and Helena lay out the situation. Darcy shows her everything, leaves nothing out, not even how she hemmed and hawed and should have told someone sooner.

“This is good work, Darcy.” Natasha says with a quiet, considering look in her eyes, “I’ll need Jane, of course, to help me with the data. Helena, if you could gather a small team to help with that part?”

“Of course,” Helena answers, and the gears are whirring already, her lower lip caught between her teeth.

“I’ll bring in…no, not Steve. Steve either goes high-level or tactical, he’s not the best at the intelligence gathering. When we find Ian, we will need him. “ Her eyebrows raise suddenly, her mouth dropping in a bright O, “This would be good for Vision and Wanda.”

“What do you mean good for them?” Darcy asks.

“Vision is a walking hotspot, he can trace back and work with the data for snap decisions and I think Wanda could use some exposure to subtlety. This will be —“

Darcy cuts her off, and Natasha blinks in response, obviously not used to Darcy or her frustrating impatience, “You are going to treat this as a training exercise? Ian is in danger!”

“He is, and he was in danger the moment he stole the data. He stayed in danger when you neglected to inform anyone of the breach or act after you realized the extent of the breach. We are now acting, and yes, I will use it to further the skills of the Avengers.” Natasha explains, serious and with little passion, with little judgement, “We will bring him out of danger, Darcy. We will figure out how Jane’s work is leaking and what they want to do with that knowledge. But with waiting, you set us back, so I will run this as I need to to make it work.”

Helena places a hand on Darcy’s arm, a reminder to hold back, and Darcy’s inner world tightens to her loose grip. Easy there, take a step back and don’t forge ahead. That’s how we got into this mess, after all.

“I’ll let you know if we need anything else from you. We might try another phone call in another day or two, but this time try to track it. I’d do it now but….”

“You don’t want to make it seem like he was passing information,” Darcy finishes, nodding in agreement.

There’s a thudding noise coming down the hallway and Darcy bites her lips. Jane has a certain gait when she’s vacillating between unhinged and eerily focused, and it’s heavy, with a bright tap to the right foot. She enters the room with her eyes alight, “What do you mean my data has been stolen!”

“Oh good, you got my text,” Natasha says with a prim smile. Darcy hadn’t even seen Natasha pull out her phone.

“I can explain!” the words bubble up through her throat before she can catch them. Telling Natasha is nothing to facing Jane, and she steels herself against the inevitable “ I — I can explain,” she continues.

“Did they hack in while we were still in London? Darcy, I told you we should have hired professionals —“

“It was Ian.” Darcy says, quick as she can.

It stops Jane, cold and uncomprehending, “Ian? Ian Boothby. Sweet as a honeybee Ian?”

“Okay that’s a little disturbing of a comparison, Foster. He made a copy when he left and I didn’t tell you when I found out, and now it’s a much bigger mess.”

“So he, what, made a copy so he could use it for his thesis?” Jane’s face scrunches, “I mean, some of it was his, and I guess he was entitled to that, but…how is it a bigger mess?”

“Someone got a hand on Ian.” Natasha intervenes, “Darcy discovered that your research was appearing on the wrong side of legal parts of the internet and was attempting to track it back to the source. In the course of her investigation, she called Boothby.”

Helena whispers in her ear, “Makes you sound a lot better than your panic, Darcy. Take it as a gift,” and then speaks up, “This is rapidly going above my pay grade. I’ll put together some discrete members of the staff to help.”

“Not Perry,” Jane says turning, “He is an asshole who never refills the coffee pot and messes up the settings on everything.”

“Not Perry because he wouldn’t know half of what a well-tuned research staff can accomplish Doctor Foster.” Helena waves as she walks away.

“From Darcy’s telling, Ian appears to be in distress and potentially held against his will. Or putting on a damn good show.” Natasha drags along a chair, sits backwards in it, “I’m cynical and haven’t ruled out a damn good show.”

“Well I slept with the guy and I’m pretty sure it’s not,” Darcy insists. Darcy has good metrics for sleeping with someone. Save your life is good for an adrenaline rush of a kiss, but sleeping with someone? That’s on a “brings your your favorite coffee without ever asking what it is” sort of scale. Ian was mostly nice, mostly bland. A jerk for copying the data in the first place, but a pushover. “His advisor! Ian told me to start there with him. Maybe we should?”

“Sounds good to me, I’ll go visit.” Jane says between her teeth, “If he pressured —“

“No, you both leave this to us,” Natasha says, with the sort of tone that implies that she really wants to rest her head in her hands, “The less you are involved, the better.”

Darcy’s just going to have to live with that, and she and Jane are shooed out of the way and out into the hall, passing Wanda with little more than a nervous wave.

It would be easier if Jane would just fire her already. Or get mad, or sad or even just tell Darcy that she’s disappointed in her. Instead, Jane hands her a stack of documents three inches thick and says, “These are let’s say, the latest works, by Doctor Beckman. I’m still working on a technical read through, but you have a good idea for patterns and reading between the lines.”

This is a true statement, Jane is good with concepts and extrapolating and pretty much being a gigantic genius in a tiny body, but she doesn’t read tone and people very well. Flipping through the pages, Darcy can tell that this isn’t strictly academic writing. There’s plenty of it, but there’s emails and forum postings. There’s even an abandoned blog.

“I think it’d be good if you looked through it and just see if you notice anything before we contact him about Ian.”

Darcy looks at Jane. There’s not a hint of anything other than her friend and boss there. There isn’t any anger and Darcy just wants it to end, “You know I’m the one that fucked up, right? That I knew he took data and didn’t tell you.”

“Yes,” Jane says, picking up a highlighter and handing it to Darcy. It’s a little gross, someone likes to chew on caps. It’s not Darcy, but she’s never seen Jane do it. They just appear, chewed up.

“So… why am I still here?” she asks, her hands flat on the table.

“Darcy, why would you leave? Do you want to leave? I wouldn’t make you stay but why do you want to leave?” Jane says, bewildered and distraught.

“Because I made a mess of everything?” Darcy tries to explain patiently, but it comes out high-pitched and edging on an abuse of whining like a teenager.

“Ian made a mess of everything, you muddied the waters even more.” Jane says, “But I’ll be honest, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone either. It’s my research and I’d want to try to control it myself even after it leaked. You should have at least told me, but….”

“It probably would have ended the same way.” Darcy finishes.

Jane nods her head slowly in nervous agreement, “Probably.” Jane smoothes down her hair, tugging and twirling the ends, “So, we’ve got work to do.”

Darcy flips the page to a photo, a poorly composed shot of a fountain that Beckman shot while on vacation and posted to his blog. “Yeah, quite a bit of work.”

“I’m not letting you go, Lewis. Better get used to it. I enjoy cheap labor.” Jane jokes, pulling her laptop closer to her, with her own dataset to go through, “Can you order chinese tonight? Or hey, sushi. There’s got to be a sushi place somewhere.”

Darcy sighs and types in a reminder on her phone to order dinner, and settles in to read Doctor Beckman’s blog about the failures of academia. But she feels better, not in what she has done because she’s always going to feel her own failure to recognize that she should have acted rather than reacted, but because she’s where she is. That she’s with Jane, and Jane still trusts and understands her.

Chapter Text

“Can’t I just, you know, steal her away for a little while?”

Darcy’s got her head down, napping when she’s supposed to be reading all of this crap of Beckman’s. Beckman is a bit of pompous egocentric blowhard, which leads him to being careless. He leaks and drips — he’s been places that line up with strange activity, the type of strange activity that has Romanov interested but tight-lipped-- but for all she can tell, Beckman isn’t a HYDRA man.

That was a dead end. Jerk, he might be, but nothing indicates secret Nazi anywhere and he’s not duplicitous enough to be a double agent or hide anything like that very well.

“If she is sleeping, then we should let her sleep,” a woman says, and through Darcy’s drowsing haze, she knows that it’s Wanda.

“Unless she isn’t actually sleeping.”
Is that actually Bucky? Teasing, with an actual lilt to his voice?
“Are you sleeping, Darcy?”

Darcy refuses to open her eyes, but her personal space is being invaded by the pair, crouching on either side of her. She wants to be sleeping, but the ridiculousness of these people beside her is more than enough that she ends up stifling a giggle.

“That does not look like sleeping,” Wanda agrees with Bucky.

“It would be sleeping if you’d leave me be.” Darcy grumbles and opens her eyes and lifts her head and looks into Bucky’s broad smile.

“Can Darcy come out to play? You’ve been holed up in here for three days. I think someone needs to drag you away.” He says, and Darcy instantly regrets that she’s put working at all costs first before even a few minutes with Bucky. “You can spare an hour or two, and then get some real sleep. If you don’t take time, you might miss something that will help Ian.”

“Bucky wants to go out. He would like to go shopping.” Wanda says with an urgent sort of levity. Bucky wanting to go out is rare enough, and it might be the first time he’s left without Steve. Darcy holds her breath in for a second and Wanda leans in, “He wants to buy clothes.”

“Sold,” Darcy says quickly. The prospect of Bucky and a dressing room is more than enough motivation, even if Bucky getting out and having fun wasn’t enough. “Give me twenty minutes to get the stink off.” Darcy hasn’t spent a lot of time in her own room lately, and that includes the shower.

“The general public thanks you for that.” Bucky says.

Darcy takes the quickest shower she can, dries off and puts her hair up in lieu of drying it. She doesn’t want to leave them waiting too long, but they are right, she needs a break. She needed to shower and let her brain rest, let her body remember that she is human instead of an information processing system. A dab of mascara and her glasses (because that’s way easier than putting her contacts back in) and she’s ready to help Bucky adjust to a new era of fashion.

There’s not a lot of places to shop, even in town, and Darcy’s the one that ends up driving, and she just finds the closest thing to a mall the town has. A couple of department stores, but there’s more of a chance that they will actually find things that Bucky will like and that will fit than at the nearby thrift store. Until now, Bucky’s been wearing mostly Steve’s clothes, plus a few things that are more or less uniform parts. His wardrobe is fairly utilitarian by default, and clearly it’s been chafing the soul of a man who was meticulous about his appearance.

“These are really ….tight looking? Are you sure we aren’t in pantyhose section?” Bucky asks, his fingers tapping against a pair of jeans.

“It’s skinny jeans,” Wanda says with a frown, “I’m not sure they’d fit you.” They do appear rather small, even after they find a pair that is supposedly in his measurements.

“He does have more shape than your average hipster.” Darcy agrees and exchanges a look with Wanda. Bucky has fantastic shape, with thick and strong thighs and well, a butt that Darcy can’t help but sneak a peek at every so often.

“I going to pretend I understand modern culture more, and suggest that we find pants that will fit over my ass,” Bucky rolls his eyes, and starts searching through the racks and Darcy starts scanning the meager department stores for jeans in a more athletic fit.

He understands things fairly quickly — the way texture and shape have changed, but he asks, dumbfounded, why any would pay money for clothes that are already ripped up. It’s a really good question.

“I don’t understand it either,” Wanda agrees, “Fashion, yes, I understand stupidity in the name of looking good. It was something Pietro…” Wanda doesn’t shy away from talking about her brother, but it still chokes her up sometimes. You look at her, you know missing Pietro is like breathing. It’s natural and unthinkable that it could ever stop. “He would have worn it. He loved the ostentatious.”

Darcy puts an arm around her shoulder while holding up a pair of Levis in her other hand, “Roomy in the ass and thighs. Perfect for your freak of nature body.”

“I’d rather look sharp.” Bucky says to Wanda and takes the jeans from Darcy.

“I would have preferred it too, but he did not care what anyone else thought except him.” Wanda responds, all matter of fact but also entirely put-on.

“Go try them on Bucky, and if they fit, we’ll get a couple of different washes and call jeans good.”

“I still can’t believe these things became the de facto sartorial choice. This is what people wore to work,” Bucky unfolds the jeans and holds them to his hips, “Well, not these at all. But this is what factory workers wore. Not rich people, and you wanted to look like the rich people if you could.”

“That, my friend, is an entire course of study,” Darcy grins, “Go try them on.”

Bucky rolls his eyes like an annoyed teenager, but heads towards the changing room. When he emerges, slightly uncomfortable in pants that aren’t sweats or glorified bdu’s, Darcy can’t help it. Her breath catches in her throat. And she could say it’s because it’s the first time she’s really seen him in clothes that don’t serve a dual purpose, that he can’t work out or well, work in. It’s not military, it wasn’t provided to him. It’s something he can make a choice on.

But really, it’s a visceral reaction. They fit perfectly, and Bucky is a beautiful man. The dark wash more encapsulates his thighs rather than hugs them, and Bucky’s slight discomfort seems more about adjusting to the fabric rather than an argument against how tight they are. “They alright?” he asks, “I think they are okay,” he tests them, bending his knees slightly, “I think they move okay.”

“Yeah, okay,” Darcy barely gets out, and then mentally shakes herself loose, “You like the color? They have them lighter too, and it’s tragic that light wash jeans exist again.”

And that’s how it goes. They pick up a couple pairs of jeans, a pair of dress slacks — if Bucky needs a suit for any reason, he’s just gonna have to get it made custom — and go from store to store in search of a few shirts and sweaters. Bucky quickly catches on again, he understands what he likes, something more than clean minimalistic lines, but things that come off as effortlessly cool. Modern cool, not a throwback retro look either, although Darcy could easily see him stepping in the fill the lead in a Rebel Without a Cause remake.

His gaze lingers as he’s trying on a soft maroon sweater and a leather jacket, wearing the jeans they bought earlier. He keeps watch over himself, pulling his hair back, playing with it, letting it hang loose. He shakes his head, and it’s not a tic, it’s not something he’s doing because he can’t believe in the image he’s presenting in the mirror.

Bucky settles for one of those ridiculous buns. Darcy refuses to call them man-buns, because it’s just another thing that doesn’t really need to be masculinized just to acceptable, but that’s what Bucky chooses. He doesn’t ask how he looks, he knows it.

This is how Bucky wants other people to see him. Comfortable in his skin, in the parts that have always been his and the parts that have become him.

“You got what you wanted?” Darcy asks, with something that feels like pride but also like longing swelling within her.

Bucky gives her a smile that’s nothing short of radiant, “I think I have.Hey, uh, next break you get, can we do a little more digging into my family?”

Wanda is watching them, Darcy thinks, watching the way Bucky plays with his zipper as he asks. “When you have the chance, Darcy. James knows you need the sleep too.”

Maybe shopping was a pretext, something easier to ask than ‘please, don’t forget about our research project right now, I need it.’ Darcy doesn’t care, she can do both. “Of course. I’ll make the time.”

Sleep is hard to come by. Darcy’s mind whips and wanders through everything she’s read over the last day or so, until she falls under by sheer exhaustion. At least now there’s a sense of order and urgency to her racing thoughts, now that they are focused on how to help Ian, how to find the information that will lead them to him.

Darcy’s role is more of a long shot, but information trades in the the details. They build and they blossom together. The defunct blog doesn’t look like much, but after sleeping for a few hours, Darcy pieces together that the professor traveled, and not just to seminars and conferences, and he never failed to discuss where he had taken in the sights. It’s a timeline of meetings and assignations as much as it is taking in the Eiffel Tower.

She builds a timeline of where and when he’s been with his horrible attempt at academic blogging. His travels were interesting enough, but Beckman could not speak with a common tongue and pomposity was his major writing style. And then she fills in his papers. The ones for the major journals don’t tell her much, there’s always a long lag between submission and when they are published, and Beckman is smart. He’s very smart. But his papers aren’t groundbreaking, he’s not a genius like Jane is.

He’s the sort of guy that gets bumped for someone like Jane.

Beckman’s had a good career though, and was, is near the top of the heap. He’s sought after to consult, has had numerous grad students go on to excellent positions, and, if you trust Jane’s frustrated yells, is a complete hack.

“I don’t think this guy did any of his own research in the past ten years!” Jane throws down a stack of print-outs of journal articles. “This is Nina Mamani’s work — my advisor was working with her and shared it with me, but Beckman published it. And this, this is Alice Hughes’s. I collaborated with her while I was a post grad and she would complain about bits of her work being stolen.” Jane frowns, “I owe her an apology, I didn’t believe her. She was always on the edge of discovery, but in areas that always had teams knocking into each other.”

“So he’s a piece of shit who steals the work of up and coming female scientists?” Darcy really hopes Beckman’s the key here, because she’d really like to take him down just for that. “Oh hell, Ian stole your work for him. Fucker.”

“Or Beckman stole the work from Ian.” Jane allows a little bit of leeway for Ian. More than Darcy feels is needed. Oh she wants to do right by him, but she’s not going forgive him for the mess he’s made. “It’s probably enough to send Natasha in to talk to him.

Natasha is magic, because five minutes after Jane says her name, she appears and while Jane takes a few minutes to explain what she’s found, Darcy pokes through her timeline. “Hey, did he take a sabbatical?” Something just seems off. There’s a six-month time period where his travel posts are perfunctory and his writing output is next to nothing.

Jane tilts her head, eyes closed, deep in thought. “It was right after he published a paper, actually a really quite profound — I wondered who he stole from that time, but it was a paper on” Jane opens her eyes and realizes that both Darcy and Natasha are waiting for her to get on with it, “It was on a specific particle’s behavior in wormhole theory. Related to my work enough that I took notice. I cited it in my last paper actually.”

“If you took notice, someone else might have as well,” Natasha considers. “Doc, I’m going to need a crash course in your research and whatever you have that’s on the cutting edge.”

“Grad student,” Darcy says, “He’ll know the major players in the field….”

“But a bright, naive grad student….” Natasha agrees.

“Bright, naive, female grad student,” Jane continues, “Well, he won’t be able to resist that at all.”

Chapter Text

“You told her about the free food thing, right?” Darcy has continually cleaned and messed up her desk a dozen times over in the past hour, just by moving papers around. She keeps thinking of papers that should have gone in the dossier and she has to check. Did she include that one? Did she remember to take out the blog post about the terrible coffee places Beckman went to three years ago. “The free food thing is important.”

“I told Natasha that any self-respecting grad student will never turn down a chance for free food. Unless it compromises her morals and political leanings. But that might be more of a you-as-a-grad-student, Darcy. I never turned down food from the Campus Crusade as long as I could sneak away without ever being seen. They always had the good pizza.”

Darcy keeps her mouth shut, because her hatred knows no bounds. The third time they knocked on her door to preach the good news on a Saturday, she point-blank asked if they got extra points for lapsed Jews over active ones. Oh, what the hell. “It’s not worth the good pizza. You get on their list and they never let up. Did you tell her about not looking too made up?”

“I got your memo, Darcy,” Natasha says, and, okay, she doesn’t look too made up. It’s Natasha, so she’s always going to be beautiful, but she’s transformed into a woman who doesn’t seem to care too much about being beautiful. Her hair is neat and straight, her clothes professional but they don’t fit quite right and are more than a few seasons out of style.

Like she aimed for classic, but what’s classic changes over time, too. It’s perfect. Natasha looks like any number of grad students who have been engrossed more in the work than how the rest of the world is moving without them.

“Not bad,” Jane says, frowning. “Did I dress like that?”

“I’m pleading the fifth, but I know I did. Except humanities style.”

“What’s the difference?” Natasha asks.

“Fewer math jokes on our t-shirts.” Darcy looks at Natasha. “You got a meeting with Beckman scheduled?”

“He is currently trying to woo both me and another member of our cohort out of the small but respectable midwestern university where we insinuated ourselves into making a visit while we are on vacation. I’ll respond later tonight that we will be available.”

“We?” Jane asks.

“Maximoff is going with me. We’re getting the party back together,” Natasha muses, caught in her own terrible joke. “It will be a good training mission for her. And she’s the right age for a wunderkind.”

Darcy bites her lip. It’s not that she didn’t know that Wanda was, well, becoming an Avenger, but she’s still working on subtle. Particularly when it comes to using her gifts. When she isn’t mucking in a person’s brain, she’s rather loud and dramatic. Then again, Wanda can muck in brains.

That would be useful if they can get close enough to Beckman to put a whammy on him. “I’m going to send her over, she doesn’t know what an American University is like. She’ll need a few lessons to be able to pass. Her accent will help.”

“You’ll take care of her, right?” Logically, there’s no reason to worry or be protective. Natasha is capable of taking care of the entire world.

“Wanda took care of herself, not to mention her brother, for years. She’s a survivor, like me, like Steve, like Bucky. She’ll be fine and I’ll be there alongside her.”

Darcy should be comforted by this; Natasha has a complex about people she considers hers. And since Barton considers Wanda one of his, through some commutative property of possessiveness, Wanda is Natasha’s, too. Thing is, Darcy’s anxiety over this whole ordeal encompasses many people. It’s expandable without a single boundary. When she grabs Wanda later in the day, Darcy’s impressed by the woman’s sheer amount of chill.

“What are the foreign students like?” Wanda asks. “I have seen movies; I understand college. We have universities, too.”

“You are younger than a typical grad student, but only by a couple of years of someone who went straight to their doctorate program. You probably didn’t spend time in the states before starting your program, so maybe you’re a bit overwhelmed by the culture shock. Naive isn’t a good word, though. Inexperienced, perhaps.” Darcy tilts her head. “Young, smart, and female probably means that you either downplay your accomplishments or you are full speed ahead about your abilities.”

“Both get you into trouble,” Wanda says with knowing smile. “Different kinds of trouble, but it’s still all sorts of trouble. I think I will be able to understand, though. It is not that different…”

“No, I guess it’s not,” Darcy says and on impulse, hugs the other woman. It takes a moment, but Wanda melts a little, and Darcy misses her sisters, her Rebecca, her brothers. A new purpose in life, and the sudden inclusion of training to be on this team helps, but nothing can replace your family. “You’ll do great. Go, and give me a way to get Ian back.”

She wants to believe it’ll be easy. He’s a professor and not a particularly outstanding one, men like this fall every day to lesser women than Natasha and Wanda. But if he is working for someone else, someone with muscle and means, it could be worse. It’ll gnaw at her insides, grind her guts and turn her out until her friends come home, safe and sound.

Wanda and Natasha leave and Darcy and Jane sit back and try to return to their normal research. Jane is able to work; she always can, she always has. Working is her solution to most of her problems; it focuses her, it’s stress relieving. It’s never been that way for Darcy; she needs distraction more than she needs her routine. Work is good, but novelty is better.

The first day, she barely putters at her desk: arranges and rearranges her files for the past few years, works at her backlog of paperwork to digitize and tag, and meddles with the lab rats.

“I want to learn about Eddie.” Bucky makes no noise until he’s right up behind her and she’s going to put a bell on him someday. She startles, straightening her back and jolting upright against his legs. “Do you have time?”

Darcy exhales and, while she calms back down quickly, her heart’s still beating too fast. “Will you stomp your feet sometime before you sneak up on me?”

Bucky finds another chair and rolls it over. “I can try. That involves changing a lot of my habits. What would I get out of all that effort, Darce?”

“Go grab me lunch,” Darcy says, “and I’ll start working on the research. Indian, I think. Lots of naan. So much naan. Text me when you get back; I’ll meet you.” She smiles at Bucky, because she is hungry and he needs something she has. Information. It’s a good deal.

Bucky smiles back, first tentatively and then spreading over his face. “I can do that, but, uh, one problem.”

“The place knows my usual order. Have you not had Indian yet?” Clearly someone has been neglecting the old man’s education, and she switches from work to this, much more fun, research. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty you’ll like in our order.” He already gone when she looks up, the sneak.

This sort of research is a different type of puzzle than working with Beckman’s collected writing. For one, she’s just working with public information. It’s an extensive amount of public information, with the resources she has access to at this facility, but it’s still just public information. But for all of that, Eddie’s almost a ghost. Census reports, a short-lived marriage and subsequent divorce, died a decade ago.

It’s disappointing. But it’s a start. There’s always more places to look than public databases. It’s a flash before Bucky gets back and they retreat to Darcy’s room for a change of pace. And less of a chance of being interrupted by Steve.

“I tell Steve it all, of course. He grew up with them, too, but I like knowing first,” Bucky says, dipping a piece of naan into his tikka saag. “It feels like a letter from home to share. Just like before.”

“Yeah well, I think Eddie might have lived lightly on this Earth. I can’t find much on him.” And it’s fucking frustrating. A Barnes shouldn’t be nearly erased from history like this. By death, sure, because death came too quickly for some of his other siblings. But to live and not make any sort of mark? It just doesn’t seem possible.

“Ruthie wrote a lot, and her correspondence was published. Maybe there’s something there?” Bucky asks. “I haven’t read any of them yet, it’s…” Bucky goes pale and he closes his eyes, thins his lips and is lost to Darcy for a moment. To a memory of one life or another he’s been living, it doesn’t matter. His expression breaks quickly. “I’m not ready for that yet.”

“I can look, if that’s okay with you?” Bucky nods in agreement and Darcy switches from databases to google books and searches through Ruthie’s letters. Eddie, Edward, Ed, Russell. It’s with Russ that Darcy starts to find mentions.

“Russ has gone off again, I’m afraid. Always needing to find himself — doesn’t he know where he is?” Darcy reads aloud. “I don’t know what he is always running from! This time, he’s purchased a cabin out in the backend of nowhere. Simplify! Simplify! Simplify! As if Thoreau didn’t drop his dirty clothes off with his mother. That brother of mine has never been prepared to take care of himself.”

Bucky frowns, sinks back into his chair. “That…doesn’t sound like him. He was so smart, a little weird, sure, but so damn smart. He was going to go places. The money I sent home…I was going to get him into one of those prep schools.”

“That I can check. o you know where you would have sent him?”

“Uh, something with Jesuits. Father would have insisted that if we were going to spend money for a fancy school, that the Church have something to do with it,” Bucky says, smiling. “Brooklyn Prep? Was that a place?”

Darcy googles; it’s a place. And with a little more judicious usage of google and the wonders of online alumni yearbooks, finds Eddie. His hair is longer than most of the other boys, not as neat and slick, and there’s no superlative underneath his name. Bucky holds a finger out to the photo on the screen.

“Eddie,” Bucky reads through the rest of the senior photos. They all have schools listed under their names, Ivies, West Point, tickets written for wherever they wanted to go. Under Eddie’s name, there’s a blank. “He looks lost. You never would have seen him like this. I had style but he was always fastidious. Everything had to be just right, in it’s place. He’d throw fits...”

“Eccentric,” Darcy mutters. “Men like that, they were called eccentric.”

“What do they call them, now?”

Darcy shrugs. “Depends on if they see a doctor for it or not. Or, he could simply be a bit of a loner who ended up really liking the woods after reading way too many of the transcendentalists in prep school.”

Bucky’s fingers, all of them, start jittering and twitching, struggling against the air and confines of his skin. He turns them into a fist and bangs it against the table. He pushes himself up, kicking the chair away and staring at the computer. “I was supposed to be there. All of this. At least if I was dead I wouldn’t care.”

“Buck-“

“I’m never going to know them, am I? I get less than a history book. I get to see how great Ruthie was because of a wikipedia article. I never saw Charlie go off to war; I could have told him things. Alice died and I wasn’t there for her kids. I’ll know almost nothing about Eddie…” His lips disappear, his eyes well up, and Darcy can do nothing more than reach out for him. “I’m his brother. I’m alive and they are all dead and I will never know who they became.”

Except, well, she didn’t want to get his hopes up, but right now it might be better than letting him spiral. He’s so precarious, and the emotional precipice he’s on Darcy can’t even begin to imagine. “I think Becca is alive,” she says. “I think. I did a quick search for her and couldn’t find a death certificate or obituary, so there’s a good chance…”

Bucky blinks and everything changes. His lips struggle to give voice to the words they mouth “Alive?”

“Probably. Give me a chance to find her, first, please, Bucky, but don’t…don’t build yourself so far that you’ll fall if I find a death certificate, okay?” Darcy reaches out and takes his hands, steadies them in her own.

The metal isn’t cold. She thought it would be, because it’s fucking metal, but it’s not. Not warm, but comfortable, and when his fingers smooth over her knuckles and stroke her fingers, “I….you don’t know how much this means to me, Darcy. I know you are busy, it’s hard enough to sit on my hands right now. I want to help.”

He doesn’t drop his hands.

“I know you do. And this helps.”

“Not the kind of help I mean.” Bucky smiles, in a nearly vicious, charming way that both relieves Darcy and seems to promise a great deal of violence at the same time.

He still doesn’t drop his hands, and neither does Darcy.

Darcy tossed and turned through the nights. Between Bucky’s earnest face and worry for Natasha and Wanda, and that gnawing, growing ulcer that’s formed for Ian, her mind has plenty of fuel for nightmares and dreams that just go a little bit south.

After a few days, she’s finally had enough and she shuts down in the middle of the day, over lunch with Hannah and nearly falling into her soup. “You gonna make it back to your room okay?”

“Hannah, do you live on base?” Darcy asks, and she can’t believe she hasn’t asked before. There’s not nearly enough room for all of the support personnel here.

“No, I’m not essential personnel. I have an apartment. I share with a couple of other people. You, however, have a room, and you should go to it.” Hannah hauls Darcy up and walks her out of the cafeteria.

Darcy sleeps deep and dreamless, curled up underneath her covers for the greater portion of the remaining day. It’s a reminder that Darcy would not function in a normal job, one where you had to keep standard hours and not work for hours on end only to crash. Or spend your nights racing across the back end of nowhere, trying to grasp the unknown.

It’s her phone that wakes her, screaming with a ring tone she only recently changed and can’t remember why, and still half asleep, doesn’t look before she answers.

“Hello?” she says.

“Darcy, what the hell did you do?” Ian’s nervous, frantic voice spits out.

“Ian? Where are you, what’s going on?” Darcy matches his tone, struggling to wake up fully between one heartbeat and the next. “Are you okay?”

“The fuck I’m not okay and I have no clue where I am. I flung myself out of a moving van, Lewis. A moving van. I thought I was done with this when I left you and the doc.”

“What kind of case do you have on your cell phone, if it survived that sort of drop? I want to buy one.”

“Lewis.” Ian says, now dry and clipped, but calmer, exactly what Darcy wanted. “My advisor was holding me against my will, along with some guys who really liked hitting me. And all of sudden, they rolled us both up and into a van under the auspices of it being for my own damn good. What did you do?”

“We were trying to find you, jackass. You need to figure out where you are.” Darcy throws off the covers because, hell, they have people that can trace phones. They have to.

“Darcy, they are going to figure out I got out of the van pretty damn quickly; you need to figure out where I am. Shit, I thought Beckman was going to have my head when I told him I wasn’t going to give him Foster’s research. What do you think they are going to do when the person that’s been interpreting it for them has gone missing?”

“What happened before you were thrown in the van?”

“I’m not sure. Yelling about a couple of women, I think. Fuck, Darcy, I can see them, I gotta run. You gotta believe me, I didn’t want any of this to happen. I don’t know what Beckman is up to or who these people are up to — they don’t keep me around when talking shop and I —“

The line drops just as Darcy gets to the command room, in her ratty pajamas. The room, including Steve fucking Rogers stares at her, as she holds her cell phone out. “I think things just went to shit.”

Steve sighs. “We know. Natasha and Wanda missed their check-in.”

“Ian called me after doing a tuck and roll from a moving vehicle. Can you guys figure out where he is based on that?”

Steve takes the phone from her. “I have no idea. It’s a good thing there are a lot of very smart people in this room.”

Darcy weighs her options. She could try to go back to bed. She could go back to work and focus her mind on other things. Instead, she finds a corner to sit and watch. The scurrying of very smart, driven, and accomplished people does more to soothe her than anything else.

She’s dazed and doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting there when the bulk and warmth of another body sits beside her. “Hey,” Bucky says. “You alright? Steve said I should come and see you.”

“Hey,” Darcy replies. “Ian called; things are not good.”

Bucky settles an arm around her shoulders and Darcy slumps against him. “Here’s the thing about very competent people, Darcy: things have to get terrible so that they can showcase that frightening level of competency.”

Darcy stays still, listens to the steady beat of Bucky’s heart. “Can I just stay here until they have something?”

“Yeah, Darcy, whatever you need.” His arm tightens around her as they wait together for some sort of news.

Chapter Text

“You are not doing any good here.” Jane pleads, trying to pull Darcy away from the door to the command room. Steve kicked her out the day before, but Darcy took that only to mean she couldn’t go inside. Darcy’s perfectly free to take up as much space as she wants in the hallway.

“I don’t seem to do a lot of good anywhere, so let me wallow and wait in peace and quiet.” Darcy’s spread out, just out of the way of the door, and slumped against the wall. Walls are good for holding her up these days.

“So, here’s the thing, normally you are taking care of me —“

“Except for the part where you are actually a grown woman and really take of yourself.”

“Oh please, you take care of me. But since I am a grown woman, I am also capable of taking care of you. And right now, you need something to do.”

Jane believes everyone reacts to shit the same way she does. That work is the salvation, but Darcy isn’t Jane. And right now, Darcy can’t function. Everything she has done at work has just created a bigger and bigger mess. There’s nothing she can do anymore without fucking up. “What can I possibly do to make this better?”

“How about you show me some of this new-fangled internet?” Bucky says coming out from the command room. He looks at Darcy, and she’s got a about a day and a half of running her fingers through her hair and stealth crying on her, and he softens at her, “Show me how to find Becca?”

Darcy keeps falling into this cycle, she doesn’t know how to break it and it’s horrible. She falls into complete disrepair and ignores the other important things. Ian is largely out of her control now, she has to have trust that Natasha and Wanda are alive and working, that Ian has escaped and is running for freedom. But right now, Bucky is restless for something to do, and Bucky is important.

Bucky has problems Darcy can actually fix.

“Yes, of course! I can do that.” Darcy scrambles up to her feet, accepting Bucky’s hand when he offers it for leverage. Jane mouths thank you to him. Has she really been that bad? “Let’s go to my room, okay? I should at least comb my hair.”

“You look fine.” Bucky insists, still in that soft, kind tone.

“That’s nice of you to say. You’re wrong, but it’s nice of you to say,” Darcy says, realizing she’s still holding on to Bucky’s hand. Letting go, she leads him through the sterile hallways to her room.

She tried to make it a little more welcoming, now that they’ve established this place as a home base for now. It’s no flat in London, or even a car lot in New Mexico, but it’s home. A cable knit throw blanket in a bright poppy red goes a long way in the word, and she wraps herself up in it to just feel a little bit warmer.

“I’m going to hit the bathroom, my laptop is on my bed, if you want to grab it.” Darcy says, “Set it up on the coffee table.”

There’s dozens of things Darcy could do to make herself presentable and feel a little better, but she settles for brushing her teeth, because it feels like there’s fur growing on them, and making something of her hair. Even a loose bun helps her feel like she’s accomplished something in the past day and a half.

She comes back to the couch and coffee table reasonably refreshed, but Bucky isn’t there. It’s only the rumbling in the kitchen, the sound of the coffee machine and the opening and shutting of the cabinets that leads her to believe he’s still here. “What do you have?” Bucky asks, his voice sure and strong and just as pleasant as the smell wafting through her home.

“Okay, Becca. Rebecca Patricia Barnes. Married Carlock Proctor, two children, Kim and Scott. Carlock passed in ’97 of a heart attack. ” Darcy reads off, “As I said, I can’t find an obituary, so I’m trying to find where she is now. The last address I had for her was in Philly, five years ago, with Kim. Scott lives in Idaho.”

“People live in Idaho?” Bucky says, bringing over two cups of coffee for them, setting them down in front of Darcy. “That’s a thing people can do?”

“Potatoes gotta get out of the ground somehow.” Darcy points out, “anyways, what I’m looking for is any indication of what Becca’s current address is. If we were lucky, it would be Brooklyn, but we aren’t that lucky. I’m halfway to just posing as a telemarketer and calling Kim and seeing if I get a reaction when I ask for Becca.”

“That seems cruel if she isn’t.”

“That’s why I haven’t done it.” Darcy racks her brain of places that she can look now that are a little less than legal. She’s snuck into a couple of SHIELD’s databases, but they’d never bothered to keep track of Bucky Barnes’s baby sister, so they weren’t much help.

It’s really rather more like Rebecca Barnes Proctor has been able to wipe herself off of the internet. Darcy looked up her own grandparents to compare and it didn’t take too many steps to get all the information she could ever want on Nana. But Becca, someone’s cleaned up for her. Even the usual scraper websites don’t have anything current on her. She finds Facebook pages for Kim and Scott, both public, with lots of pictures.

Darcy pulls Bucky in closer to scroll through the photos. As she clicks next over and over again, and a wistful smile shines on his face. He swallows down his emotions as he looks over the pictures of his niece and nephew. “She looks like Ma,” He says, running a finger down a close up of Kim as she looks up and away from the camera, “She looks so much like my mother.”

Darcy finds the next family photo, a graduation photo for a Timothy Proctor. UPenn, engineering, magna cum laude, even. From Bucky’s family have come great things, and potential, and he’s enjoying every moment of it.

“Grandkids.” Darcy says, “It’s gotta be the grandkids. One of them understands privacy and worked to get her public information off the net. I just bet….” Darcy goes quiet as she runs another search, looking for legal actions and police reports.

She finds what she’s looking for, an incident of identity theft, reported and filed and nothing came of it. As she reads off the the public record, Bucky grows grim, “Right now, I’m glad I was frozen at that time. Bilked my sister out of five grand and …if I knew what a credit rating was, I’d be pissed off that they ruined it. Track those fucks down.”

“Hold on there, here’s the best part. This address for Becca is only two years old, in a senior living center in, and I can’t believe how lucky we are, Brooklyn.” Darcy leans back and grins. She’s got a lead now, and calling an old folks home is better than calling family members.

“You found her,” Bucky says, his breath catching in his throats, “Darcy, I can’t…Darcy, thank you. My sister….she’s still…”

“Very likely to be alive,” Darcy confirms. It’s late, she doesn’t want to call the front office right now, but odds are in their favor.

Bucky throws his arms around Darcy, almost hard enough to give her whiplash with the force. He buries his face in her shoulder,and every bit of emotion he’d been holding back pours out of him. Darcy cradles his head, as ragged breath turns into a racking sob against her skin.

“Oh Bucky, it’s okay,” Darcy says, her fingers combing through his hair, “I’ll call and confirm so we can plan.We’ll figure out where to go from here when you’re ready.”

Bucky straightens himself back up, his eyes starting to redden and his cheeks damp. He touches Darcy’s cheek, a soft caress, “I…I just…” He lets out a small breath and smiles so faintly, Darcy knows he must be near to bursting on the inside.

His fingers trace the curve of her jaw, “I think I want to kiss you.”

“You think?” Darcy says, her lips parting in surprise.

“Yes. I used to be smoother about this kind of thing, but I hear that’s it’s polite to ask first now.” Even with the tracks of tears left on his face, trailing through stubble, Bucky’s charm seeps through and Darcy nods. He takes that as his cue and leans in and presses his lips to hers.

There’s no hesitation, no tentative movement to back away. Nothing to indicate that this was a mistake, that they are better off friends. Darcy’s hands drop and hold onto his shoulders, bringing him closer to her, letting gravity help in her favor, deepen the embrace and the sweetness of his lips parting. Gravity and weight means Bucky leaning over her, skin pressing against the back of her neck, and metal patiently helping her steady her descent to sofa cushions.

It’s a hell of a kiss. Practiced, sweet and personal. Darcy just gets to feel the weight of him, body and burdens and history, and somehow when the kiss ends — he’s lighter.

“Would I want to know what you have been getting up to?” Steve is asking a very large screen as Darcy runs in through the door.

It’s been two days of radio silence. Nothing from Natasha, Wanda or anything further from Ian. It’s made for fretful nights only made bearable by Bucky’s presence and the fledgling relationship between them. There’s enough between them that there’s time to take things slow. They have to. Neither of them is fragile, but they both are under a great deal of stress. They’ll keep it quiet until at least one of their stressors has run it’s course, and make sure that this is something that has a life expectancy beyond Darcy’s elevated heart rate.

On the screen, giving Steve a side-eye to end every side-eye, larger than life and thankfully alive is Natasha. She does look more than a little worse for wear — not only is her hair messed up in a dozen different directions, but there is dried blood on her neck. But there’s no obvious wound anywhere on her.

“Yes, I suppose not. It’s good to see your face though. Maximoff, is she alright?”

Wanda comes out from behind Natasha, and her hair — her hair is magnificent. Whatever they’ve been doing, it hasn’t involved a hair straightener, and the curls are busy returning to their natural state. “I’m doing very well now.”

“She didn’t even destroy anything. You’d be very proud Rogers.” Natasha says, “She avoided collateral damage. And she found us another surprise.”

“Did you find me a date, Romanoff? That was very kind….” Steve snarks but quickly goes quiet as the screen gets very crowded.

“Ian!” Darcy shrieks, and possibly overloads a speakers or something, because the feedback makes everyone wince. “Sorry. It’s just —you aren’t dead! How the hell are you not dead?”

“Hi Darcy,” Ian says, “I missed you too. Your new friends are very scary and very helpful.”

That is a fair assessment of both of the woman, so Darcy just shrugs. Natasha continues, telling Steve that they are en route and will be at a secured site in a couple of hours, “We’re going to need Foster in the debrief. Darcy, you too. We’re sending you the data we recovered as an encrypted file, have Foster look over it.”

“Who are we looking at here?” Steve asks, “Any idea on who Beckman was working for?” He’s got words on his tongue. HYDRA.

“That still remains to be seen. Looks like an international think tank that wants to branch out into practical applications of theoretical data.”

Darcy looks up at Natasha. This makes sense. This is something she understands. Petty academics who want more power than lording over the lives of undergrads they can manipulate. “I’ll look the data over. Rogers, do we have any leads I can sort through?”

Natasha’s overly large face smiles in satisfaction as Rogers sets Darcy up at a work station, calling up file after file. “We’ll see you in two hours.”

“Make it two and a half, and pick up some sandwiches on your way in.” Steve counters as the image slips away.

Darcy’s been working in and around academics for awhile now, and she knows one thing. Scientists can’t write. A scientist that can switch from the secret language of phds to normal human speak is rare. A beautiful precious butterfly. But even more rare is for someone’s writing to not sound like them.

“If any of this data has their notes, I might have something for you.” A turn of phrase, the way they punctuate, horrible grammar, it’s all a blueprint to the makeup of a particular person. Jane believes in two spaces after a period, the oxford comma, and a dozen adverbs when none would suffice.

She caught Beckman by his writing. She arranged and rearranged his work until he could be tracked. Darcy believes in the power of research, in data and intuition, and in asking the right questions. People are predictable until they aren’t anymore, until they snap and need something novel. Jane’s research is new and shiny, and her work stands out against the rest. Darcy knows that work intimately, even if she can’t quite wrap her mind around it.

To focus on the other, the unfamiliar, the things that are goddamn novel, that’s what she can do. Find the patterns in them, make them predictable. Every scientist has their own way of writing, and well, Darcy is a very good editor. She calls in Hannah, she harasses Jane to let her know what’s going on, and quickly her little work station is expanded with the three women passing work back and forth to each other.

Jane understands the work, “This guy is an idiot, but he’s a whiz with practical applications of the theoretical concepts.”

“Yeah, let’s switch, because this guy couldn’t build a house out of Legos,” Darcy rolls her eyes and hands a stack of papers over to Jane and turns to Hannah, “I need you to feed this phrase,” she points to a highlighted passage on a tablet, “Into your magic machine there. It shows up all over the place, and I think it’ll narrow our search down.”

Hannah tilts her head, “How do you even pronounce….nevermind, I don’t need to know.”

They’ve identified three main writers and Darcy’s named them as Builder, Thinker and Tinkerer. Builder is all about the practical, but as Darcy said, a few bricks short of a house. Thinker is the opposite with grandiose plans and a brain to rival Jane’s but none of it is useful. Tinkerer is a problem, “He’s dangerous. He’s the explosive element.” Darcy says to Steve. The source of their novel thinking and the instigator. But he’s distinctive in how he writes and Hannah is excellent at cross referencing. It’s only a matter of time.

Jane stands straight up, kicking her chair out, “Shit,” she says, “shit, shit shit. It doesn’t matter who they are, we need to get to the lab. I need to get to the lab.”

“You better believe you do,” Natasha enters the room, Ian and Wanda behind him. “Their names are Wattley, Turner, and Gordon. Jane, what exactly can your portals do?”

“What would you do if you wanted to cheat the world, make money and could open stable openings between two locations?” Jane answers back.

There’s really no response for that.

Chapter Text

Darcy’s torn between hugging the shit out of Ian and slapping him. There’s so much of this that he set into motion by taking all of Jane’s work, but as he talks, he explains that Beckman had been his advisor since the start of grad school, but hadn’t cared much for him. “I wasn’t clever enough for him,” he admits, “He didn’t care about those of us just trying to get through, you know? He liked the clever, manipulative ones.” His hands flatten against the conference table, “When I told him that I had lucked into meeting Darcy, the assistant to Jane Foster? He changed. Told me that was fantastic, and that I could take whatever time I needed without any penalty.”

Jane’s nose crinkles, “Surely you didn’t believe him.”

“No, of course not. I never got the preferential treatment. But I figured I’d milk it until he called me back.”

“And then Jane got famous,” Natasha says.

“And then Jane got famous,” Ian agrees, “And of course, I tell him that Foster is going back overseas and he flips, will kick me out if I go with and that the only way he won’t ruin me is to bring him a copy of Foster’s work.” His fingers drum and his head shakes, “I was blindsided and just went along with it, rationalizing his motives. Maybe he just wanted to see what I had been doing in context. I decided to keep my mouth shut and just come back. I figured Darcy would have noticed and done…something.”

“I did,” Darcy says and oh, there’s so much regret in her voice, “I noticed, but I screwed up and didn’t say anything.” Darcy’s okay with taking that much responsibility for her part in the whole mess. She didn’t start it. It’s no one’s fault except for the the disastrous trio at the top and their minions.

Jane smiles at Darcy, proud of her. Darcy isn’t blaming herself for everything anymore and that’s what gets Jane’s respect.

Ian continues with his story, and it’s quite like Darcy’s. He gave the work over and couldn’t figure out how to tell Darcy or Jane. He wanted to, even when he thought it was just intellectual theft. That was bad enough, of course, but not nearly the same magnitude of what they were having him do after being kidnapped.

Jane gives a rundown of the science behind the portals, “Right now, we can make them form at will, but where they form is kind of a crapshoot. Think general vicinity rather than anything precise. This room, but not in the doorway.”

“So they couldn’t just open one into a bank vault and grab the cash with just their hands whenever they needed to buy something?” Darcy asks. Mostly rhetorically.

“Banks don’t keep that much cash on hand, Darcy. The depository at Fort Knox perhaps,” Rogers answers, because he’s a shit and answers rhetorical questions.

“And in any case, that’s not their thought process. In their heads, they aren’t thieves. Even Doctor Foster’s work they rationalize as information wanting to be free, and they just took what should always be open source.” There’s a coordinated eye roll between Ian and Jane. Jane shakes her head, because while she believes in transparency and access, her work is hers, and credit should be hers as well.

Natasha stands up, paces a little, “They want to be seen as good people, doing the right thing.”

“They had me working out how to regulate energy transfer between the portals.” Ian answers, “I have a lot of data to share, doc, you’re going to love what can be done.”

“Energy transfer?” Jane ponders and her eyes go distant, overwhelmed with the possibilities.

“Green energy?” Darcy asks out loud, “I mean, they want to look good and make money. If they could compete with Stark for an alternate energy source….”

“Exactly,” Ian swallows, “Once they realized that they could pull energy….”

“That would completely destabilize the connection though, you’d collapse—“ Foster continues, questioning the line of reasoning that Ian is putting forth.

“That was the point we were disagreeing on when I managed to escape. They didn’t like my answer one bit that setting up portals to produce clean energy would be dangerous, both on our end and wherever the energy comes from.”

“Where are they now?” Darcy asks, “You wouldn’t have left if they were still overseas. And they would need…Jane, do you still have that equipment back at—“

“Culver, yes. A storage unit. Why—“ Jane’s eyebrows knit and then jump in expectant realization, “Oh! That’s just mean. Steal my work and then steal my machines? Not even willing to put in a tiny amount of effort to profit off their plagiarism.”

It’s amazing, the righteous academic rage that Jane will work herself into given half a chance. But there’s a larger problem. “That equipment. That was our first run, it couldn’t possibly contain the amount of energy that this is going to create. There’s a reason we haven’t been pursuing that avenue of research. It’s not that we care about Stark’s business model, it’s because Earth doesn’t have anything that can conduct it. Yet.” Darcy continues, and Jane is just beaming at her, “I do listen to you. I don’t always understand you but I do listen to you.”

Ian continues, “Yes well, they aren’t very good at interpreting data, which is why they were having me do it. It didn’t matter, they want to try. It’s part of their business model.” Ian twists the words into derision.

“So we go to Virginia, to Culver, and meet them there.” Jane says.

The lights dim. They shouldn’t dim. The entire place has backups of backups. They are states away from Culver. The lights dim further and then return to normal.

Everyone stands up, even Darcy and Ian who follow by sheer inertia Things start happening, people start getting organized and Natasha calls for gearing up and asking who is available.

Jane holds up her hands at this, “Wait, you need to take Barnes with you.”

Steve stops short, almost tripping over his own feet. Bucky hasn’t gone out on anything more strenuous than a trip into town and training in the gym with Steve, “Why?”

“There’s a reason we didn’t move the equipment. Thor had to get it into storage for us to begin with. You two might be able to move it. Possibly. If you do it together.” Jane smiles brightly, “Look at the bright side. At least you know where everything is going to happen. Let me get you the address.”

Bucky fidgets when he’s gearing up, or rather, when they are locating gear for him. He steadfastly refuses to wear his HYDRA-issued getup, and no one blames him for that. But he’s a strangely shaped man and he’s only built up more muscle since he got his head screwed back together. “Steve wears everything too tight.” Bucky says when Darcy loots the closet, “I won’t feel comfortable enough to move in that.”

“And you think anyone else is going to have anything better fitting? I’ve been shopping with you. Your larger than fantasy life proportions are going to hamper any chance of finding off the rack combat gear.” Darcy thumps the folded fabric with a pointed finger, “Strip.”

“Larger than fantasy?” Bucky says with raised eyebrows, “Not complaining sweetheart….”

“Put on the damn clothes and go save my alma mater from being exploded. Again.” Darcy says but she can feel the blush hot on her cheeks and chest. “Steve’s scaring you up some body armor, and you are supposed to go to the armory after this.”

Bucky strips down like he’s still in the army. Quick and fast, not nearly enough for Darcy to enjoy but enough to see a tantalizing amount of skin. He’s changed into the field pants and an undershirt, but Darcy’s still got his shirt.

She holds it out to him, and he tugs on it with a slow, easy smile. Darcy holds on tight, reeling him in for a kiss. It’s a comforting one, but she isn’t sure who is supposed to be comforted by it.

“You, uh, can you find out if…?” Bucky says, quiet and into her ear.

Darcy draws him in for a tight, quick hug and runs her hands up and down his back. “Of course, I’ll do it now, you finish your stuff.” She passes the shirt to him and he scrambles to get it on. It is painfully tight. Steve’s got broader shoulders, but Bucky is slightly more barrel-chested. They are both ridiculous, but in different ways.

Darcy’s seen the photo of the before Bucky. In many ways, his transformation is even more dramatic. Steve chose his and his was all at once, emerging like a awkward cygnet. Bucky’s was and is an ongoing chain of events, guided without care for the man beneath.

Bucky hesitates before walking out to the armory, reaching out to run his fingers down her arm and rub the fabric at her wrist between his left thumb and forefinger. The cuff of her shirt has a lace overlay, “Interesting,” he tells her, leaning in to kiss her cheek before leaving.

Not for the first time, Darcy wonders just how much Bucky doesn’t tell her, how much he holds back — not about his past, because that’s his own story to tell and it’s not her place to demand. But she wonders about now, what he plans for, what a month, six months, a year down the line. There’s no need to know now, just days into a relationship, intimacy takes time to grow. These past couple of days, the lightness of his touch in their spare moments, speaks of more than just a tentative desire.

Darcy fingers her phone in her pocket. This isn’t a call she’s wanted to make — even if Becca is alive, there’s no guarantee that she’s at this home, that she’s in a state to understand how her brother is alive.

It has to be done though, and she’s had the number saved for days now. There’s nothing but the doing.

The phone rings twice before a pleasant but obviously bored woman answers, “Brooklyn Assisted Living, how may I help you?”

Darcy freezes for a second. Does HIPPA extend here, can they even confirm if they have a resident there? She won’t just come out and ask, so perhaps a different tactic? “Hi, I’m Darcy Lewis with the…” can’t say Avengers, can’t say Avengers, “The James Buchanan Barnes Historical Society,” She can run with that, “We are trying to confirm if this is the current address for Rebecca Barnes Proctor. Would you be able to do that?”

“Rebecca Proctor?” The woman pauses, “Let me check,” Darcy can hear the clicking of a keyboard, and the woman mutters about checkboxes and privacy. But everything must pass muster because the next thing she hears is, “Yes, would you like to be connected to her room?”

“No, no thank you. But please, let her know we were looking for her. There’s some potential news we are working on and we’d like to involve her once we are on a little firmer ground, but we aren’t ready to release the details yet in case it falls through.”

“I’ll be sure to let her know,” the woman replies and with pleasantries done, so is the phone call.

Darcy throws herself into the preparations for the mission. While SHIELD had extensive files on Culver and their grounds due to, well, due to the Hulk, Jane and Darcy have more. They highlight the stores where the trio would have to buy supplies, likely spots to stay, who among the faculty would know them.

It comes down to this. Steve, Bucky, Sam and Natasha go in — War Machine on standby since he does technically have a day job. Thor agreed to stay behind as well, as he and Jane can explain over comms any work that needs to be done. Wanda is working as a handler of sorts as Jane cannot predict how her powers would interact with the portals. It’s better not to risk it. If more backup is needed, well, Thor can fly. Tony is another genius and Vision is currently with him. There’s always more support when they work together. Barton put himself on the C-list this time.

“Lila’s birthday,” Natasha explains, “Only call if the world is actually ending, otherwise he’s really excited about being at a Princess Tea Party.”

“All I can think of now is Barton arching with his pinky out,” Steve says, gear in hand, ready to go.

“You got to be proper about these sorts of things,” Bucky agrees. The three are the last ones to leave for the helicopter, and are just finishing up the pre-mission checklists and comm-checks.

Darcy catches Bucky’s attention, flashes him a great big smile and a thumbs up. He mouths back at her, “Really?” and tightens the grip on the bag he carries. He returns her smile and throws his arm around Steve’s shoulders.

“Everything’s going to be just fine Rogers. Let’s stop yapping and get to work.”

“I didn’t realize you were so committed to this….” Ian holds his hands up, trying to encapsulate the entirety of the Avengers operation, “this….” He shakes them, “You didn’t seem all that interested before.”

Darcy makes a show of rolling her eyes, “You saw me with Jane, how can you not say I was committed?”

Ian nervously putters about for a second, standing while Darcy sits, taking in what she’s allowed to see of the mission. (They’ve said no to her being active on the comms unless she needs to be. It’s completely unfair! She wouldn’t be that much of a distraction.) Ian has been understandably distant, preferring his own company, and answering questions only when asked.

In some way, that’s progress. Being cagey about what he says and to whom? Much better than just handing over their research.

“Back in London, you gave off an air of not really caring about anything. Oh sure, you were engaged with the work and with Jane, but you didn’t seem to care about what happened with it.”

“The things that happen with Jane’s research? Tend towards the world-ending. Not caring was a defense mechanism.” She pokes at him, “And don’t you get it? Outward expression doesn’t show everything going on underneath.”

Ian tilts his head and sighs, “I never really stood a chance of actually getting you.”

“No, not at all. But we sure had a good time figuring out we sucked together.” Darcy smiles at him, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Ian looks tired and pale, he’s talked his brains out for the past few days, and there’s no blaming him for being a little melancholy. It’s somewhat of a miracle he’s functioning, but Ian’s always had more strength than he knows. It’s a point of difference between them — Darcy knows she strong under pressure even if she doesn’t act like it; Ian acts like a mess but manages to persevere despite himself.

“I’m not really okay,” Ian says, the truest statement he can muster, “But you know what’s stupid? All I can think is how I have to get another advisor.” He bites his lips and he looks at Darcy, “Look at me, I’m traumatized and I just want to get back to work.”

Darcy cracks up laughing, she can’t help it, “You’re a real scientist now!” and it just flows out of her. It’s infectious and Ian joins with a hysterical, sobbing laughter that eventually lifts a few worries off of his back.

He doesn’t stay much longer, begging for sleep. Darcy lets him go, and her attention goes back to listening to the mission chatter. So far, it’s going smooth. They’ve got the storage facility secured and have eyes on Foster’s specific unit. What they choose to do is spring a trap. Cripple the machines so that there’s no way that they will perform the tasks that the lazy trio wants them to do.

Jane’s walking them through it when Natasha musters an indigent sigh, “Is that a film crew? Maximoff, why is there a film crew here? Did you get EZ Storage’s appointments?”

“I did!” Wanda says.

“Wait, film crew?” Jane asks, “Is there a big blue circle with a large 52 in the middle?” Darcy swears as Natasha confirms, and Jane groans. “C52 is the student run tv station. No one watches them anymore, so they branched out into digital media. Darcy, Darcy get in here.”

“Oh hell,” Natasha says, breathless. All they’ve got now is the sound of fighting, groans and breath and eerie cracks and breaks.

When she’s allowed into the mission room, she gets a visual of the scene. The trio brought muscle. Big muscle, and Steve and Bucky are at ease with them but it’s allowing the gentlemen a chance to get to the equipment.

“It’s been defanged,” One of them says irritably, “That’s cute. I can fix it. Keep them off of me.”

The fight continues. The repair continues. “Shit, these guys weeble and wobble and don’t fall down,” Nat swears a pretty storm up and down as everything just continues on and on.
Darcy closes her eyes as one man goes down, rather permanently, through some distinctive shield work. The noise of it all is worse than actually seeing it. It’s visceral and immediate without a camera’s distance, and she has to open her eyes.

The room shakes. “The hell…” Jane’s jaw drops, “They shouldn’t have been able to….Rogers, that equipment needs to not work anymore, now, before the buildup destroys a lot more of the town than the Hulk ever did.”

Steve is locked in tight against two of the hired guns and yells out, “Bucky, you got that?”

“On it, Cap!” Bucky breaks free of his own fight and guns for the machinery. He tears the scientist away, sending him flying until he smacks against the wall. Darcy can hear bones breaking and a terrified scream of pain.

“Uhh,” one of the technical crew says, “I got something else…” he pulls up a second camera feed. This one isn’t the grainy security footage from the storage unit. C52 blares what’s going on a few second delays, a breathless young woman narrating the events as they happen.

The camera zooms in on Bucky slamming his fist into Jane’s beloved equipment over and over again. He is unequivocally Bucky in the shot, looking exactly like the focused young man everyone had seen in their history books, plastered on posters, and as part of the backdrop of patriotic figures of politicians for a generation.

The girl--and Darcy doesn’t know her at all but christ, she looks determined and trembling!--announces, “I’m fairly certain that’s Bucky Barnes…”

About twelve google alerts buzz on her phone at once, all from students with C52. There’s vines and tweets and youtube clips. Before Natasha can detain the film crew, and Steve and Bucky subdue the muscle and the scientist, the re-emergence of James Buchanan Barnes is trending and there’s no way stopping it now.

“Oh shit, what do we do now?” Wanda asks herself in between tying up the loose ends of the mission.

“Bring them home, I guess.” Darcy answers, “And we let the fallout happen.”

They don’t get a choice of how Bucky gets revealed to the world, but being revealed by an overzealous college camera crew turned out to be a blessing. No one expected that the first clear media photo of Bucky Barnes was going to be a selfie with a twee twenty year old. She looks happy to be there, Bucky looks — he’s fully present, his eyes intense and charming, but the rest of him is caked in scruff and dirt. He looks hard-worn, because he is hard worn. The caption blasting around the world, “Sgt Barnes’s first day back to work” encapsulates the response well.

There will be more fallout, but they can’t live their lives holding their breath waiting for it. Officially, they’ve asked for privacy, but it’s really a stall tactic while the Avengers get everything about Bucky ready for public consumption.

They are her problems only in that she’s standing next to the man who has to face them.
As far as she’s concerned, they are her problems too, but better to let Bucky lean on her than prop him upright.

“What’s Ian going to do?” Bucky asks, his eyes closed and his head resting in Darcy’s lap. It’s a quiet night in for them, something that’s difficult for Darcy to wrap her mind around. It’s been so long since she’s had free time without a pressing problem like Ian, or Jane’s rouge work, that it takes Bucky’s weight on her to stop her from fidgeting straight out of her skin.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if he does either. I think he has a call set up with his department to just start figuring shit out. Maybe they have a protocol for when your advisor has caused an international incident.”

“What about Jane?”

Darcy laughs, “She had only just been granted a tenure-track position at Culver. And they only did that when people started using the word Nobel in connection with her work.”

Bucky chuckles about how none of that makes sense, but before Darcy can explain just how immensely fucked up academia has become, her phone rings. It takes a few rings before she can pull it out from where it was wedged between her thigh and the couch, and she fumbles to answer without looking at the number.

“Hello?” Who would be calling her? Everyone she knows is here.

“Is this Darcy Lewis?” The woman on the other end has a familiar accent, like Steve or Bucky’s when they get excited, “Of the James Buchanan Barnes Historical Society?” the woman mocks lightly.

“Uh, yes?” Darcy says, straightening her back and taps Bucky soundly so he sits up.

“Would you be a dear and put my damn brother on the phone? He’s parading around on the television and the computers like he has never heard of calling his beloved sister. What, he finds that boy Rogers again and doesn’t have time for his family?” Darcy has to hold the phone away from her ear and then gets the brilliant idea to turn on the speakerphone.

“Gladly Ms Proctor. Buck, it’s your sister.” Darcy lays the phone down between them.

“Becca?” Bucky’s voice breaks on her name and says with wide eyes, and “How you been, kid, how you been?”