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“Why are you following me?”
Darcy lowered herself into the seat across from the scruffy brunette guy, and swapped out his nearly full to-go cup of plain black coffee with a hazelnut latte.
“I’m not following you,” he lied as he stared suspiciously at the cup. This was not the normal reaction to being discovered by a mark. Unless she was trying to poison him? He really hoped she wasn’t trying to poison him.
Darcy rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen you around for the past two days. You just followed me from one Starbucks to another Starbucks, that are only a block and a half apart from each other. In an attempt to preserve your cover, you threw out your nearly full cup of coffee right outside the door, which is a waste of at least three bucks--you should really order the smaller sizes--and you keep ordering plain black coffees even though you clearly don’t enjoy drinking them.” She motioned at the cup in front of him. “Try that. It tastes less like diesel fuel.”
He looked vaguely distressed. “If you think I’m following you, why would you approach me? I could be dangerous.”
Darcy flipped her hair over her shoulder and settled into the chair, legs crossed at the knee and one elbow propped on the chair back. “You been observing me for days, from a distance, not visibly armed, seemingly without backup. You with SHIELD? Because I thought Fury had finally given up the ghost on trying to surreptitiously surveil me.” She pointed more forcefully at the hazelnut latte in front of him. “Drink the damn coffee. If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be twitching on the floor already.”
He ducked his head and took a tentative sip, eyebrows reflexively arching in surprise at the pleasant taste.
“See? It’s good, right?” the girl coaxed from across the table.
He nodded and took a larger sip. It was good. Stevie had always liked a smart dame.
“Now, to return to the original issue: why are you following me?”
He seemed to have trouble formulating an answer, but not, Darcy thought, because he was formulating a lie. She really hoped he wasn't some lovesick stalker working up to a declaration of his feelings, because that would be super awkward.
“Have to keep you safe. Steve--Steve left to find me, so I have to keep you safe.” He shook his head, frustrated. “Steve shouldn’t have left.”
Darcy blinked. “Say what ?”
She hadn’t managed a solid view of his face yet, because he was wearing a plain baseball cap pulled low over his face. She melted out of her pose, leaning towards him over the table, and murmured in a quiet voice, “Bucky? Is that you?”
He looked up, surprised. “You know me?”
“I know of you. Steve talks about you all the time.” She chuckled, suddenly amused. “I told Steve he was wasting his time heading straight for Europe. Hard to get through airport security with that particular prosthetic, no matter how good your passport is.”
Bucky winced. “He should know better. Always was too impulsive.”
She nodded, and then narrowed her eyes. “I haven’t seen you eat anything yet.”
“What?”
“Steve eats like, all the time, and your metabolism should be similar. You hungry?”
Bucky blinked. The Asset did not feel hunger. The Asset could have no weakness.
But he was not The Asset anymore, he reminded himself. Bucky Barnes knew hunger. Was he hungry?
“Yes.”
The girl smiled at him, toothy and almost proud. “Come on, I know a great place down the street with massive burgers. And really good onion rings, you like onion rings?”
Bucky stood to follow her, taking the cup she pressed into his hand before he could forget it, and shrugged. “I don’t know. Can’t remember having them.”
Darcy glanced back as she led him out of the coffee shop, smile a little more melancholy but no less genuine. “You can try some of mine, then. But if you don’t like them, you’re wrong, just saying. I mean, you can dislike bad onion rings, but not these. Not that I am the type to put conditions on friendships, obviously, but we might never be able to go to this place again if you say something bad about their onion rings.”
Bucky listened, amused, as the tiny brunette dragged him down the sidewalk, chattering on about the first time she had taken Thor to this particular restaurant and he had proceeded to plow through half a dozen orders of onion rings on his own.
She was holding his metal hand.
***
When Steve skyped Darcy for the first time in almost a week, holed up with Sam in an old hotel in Berlin, he did not expect the first sentence out of her mouth to be, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Not that Darcy was not full of surprises, because she was, quite frequently. But it wasn’t her usual opening.
“Yeah, sweetheart? You run out and adopt a puppy without telling me?”
She snorted, clearly amused. “Well, you’re not entirely wrong. But you’re not exactly right either.” She beckoned to someone off-screen, and Steve felt the breath whoosh out of his chest when Bucky-- his Bucky, not the shell of him from the helicarrier in DC--sat down next to his girl on the couch in his apartment in New York and gave a hesitant wave.
“Hiya, punk.”
“How--just how?” Sam, who had been across the room reading a well-thumbed paperback he had picked up from the communal shelf in the hotel lobby, seemed to sense something was off and wandered over to check on Steve, peering at the laptop screen over his shoulder.
Darcy shrugged. “Apparently his sense of chivalry was offended when you left me here to fend for myself.”
“She spotted my surveillance.” Bucky sounded oddly delighted. “Walked right up to me and asked me what I thought I was doing following her around.”
Steve didn’t know whether to laugh, because of course Darcy had spotted him and given him a hard time, or cry, because Darcy really should not be confronting the world’s most prolific assassin on her own.
“Anyways, he’s all moved into the second bedroom, so how soon can you get home?”
Sam, from over Steve’s shoulder, groaned. “You telling me that your girl found him while we’ve been backpacking through all the saddest hotels in Europe?”
“Apparently.”
“Man, from now on, I’m listening to her tactical plans first.” Sam fumbled his StarkPhone out of his pocket and mumbled, “How soon do you think Stark can get a plane here for extraction?”