Chapter Text
Her life was an endless cycle of bad to worse to better to bad again. She had accepted this as a part of her life, but the long periods of time between worse and better were getting longer and more complicated. School, work and responsibility had become her life. It was as if there was no more Darcy... Only Zuul... meaning, work and boring adult life. Darcy was almost twenty-two and her life already felt like it was slipping away from her.
Darcy was pretty fresh out of high school when her parents decided that it was time for her to become independent while attending college. With the usual “Back in my day....” and “When I was a kid...”, she got an apartment, a job, and a car and started a life of her own, free from her parents.
A knock at the door had disrupted Darcy’s train of thought as she had started to unwind from today’s workday. K.C’s had been a nightmare with the big sale day and a million customers asking if coupons worked or not on certain items.The entire day had been a cycle of ringing up one unhappy customer after another and it had finally started to wear on her after hour six. Plus, having a second job at the research department at the military base wasn’t any help.
Darcy worked in the top secret labs ten stories below the regular base. She thought it would look good on her transcripts and they were looking for college kids at the job fair. Since she worked with Jane, Darcy had become accustomed to SCIENCE!, but wanted to be on the more medical/life-saving kind of science side. Due to her previous lab experience, Darcy sped up the ranks pretty quickly. Darcy was a lab assistant/gofer/intern to the division working on cures for cancer and HIV. Nothing new. They had a running joke in the lab that it was the next ‘super-soldier’ formula and that with the human trials, they’d create the next Captain America.
That guy had suddenly made an appearance from the great beyond and with him came allies that protected earth from aliens and tyrannical demigods. They were called the Avengers according to the news and they definitely caught her attention. They went off radar, but Darcy researched them as much as she could. Not much, but a start.
In fact, keeping up with all the super-heroics had become a hobby of hers. She didn’t know how to explain it, but she felt invested in their welfare like she had with Thor, only now her bubble had expanded. Darcy kept tabs on the Fantastic Four, the X-men, the Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and the new Spider-man in New York. Her only excuse was it kept her out of trouble on weekends.
Darcy missed the easy going days of her and Jane riding around in the desert, looking at the stars. Life was simpler back then. She missed Jane. Erik. The stars. Thor.
After Jane was whisked away to Norway, Darcy had been sent home to California to live in ignorance until the Avengers happened and even then she had to keep her trap shut because of all the forms they made her sign.
Little did she know, Darcy’s life was about to get a whole lot more complicated.
Darcy came home, took off her shoes, and logged onto the computer when the wretched knock came to the door again. She huffed and pulled herself out of her spinning chair and made her way to the door. She opened it without thinking and was confronted by a group of scary looking thugs in matching track suits. Darcy shut the door as quickly as she opened it, but it was all too easy for them to just break it down and suddenly the apartment was filled to the brim with them.
“Vhere do you think your going, leetle girl? You’ve got information ve vant and ve’re not leaving ‘til ve get it, understand? In fact, ve’re just going to take you vith us.... got it, bro?,” the leader grabbed her painfully by her hair and dragged her outside into the parking lot.
These guys sounded like Dracula, but looked like gym rats. Darcy didn’t know whether to laugh or be completely terrified. She went with terrified since they were in the process of kidnapping her for no apparent reason.
“Please, what are you talking about? What information? I’m just a sales associate!,” Darcy tried to play off as innocently as she could. Maybe they would think they got the wrong person.
“You are Darcy Lewis, yes? Then you are right person, bro,” one of the other thugs reasoned.
“Hey, boss, she pretty... Can I have her after ve get the information?,” another thug leered at her. The leader grunted in the affirmative and was still dragging Darcy by her hair when he stopped abruptly. She looked up to find a figure blocking them from the unmarked SUV’s she assumed they were going to use.
The leader released her hair, but put her in a choke hold facing the figure and a gun to her head. The figure pointed a gun at her captor and said simply, “She’s mine. Give her to me.”
The figure was tall, muscular, and his long brown hair made him look like a stark contrast to the slobby looking tracksuit Draculas Darcy was surrounded by. His face was mostly obscured by a mask and goggles that covered his eyes and lower half of his face. The goggles were looking straight at her.
“HA! You vant her. Come get her, Vinter Soldier. You are just a ghost story, bro!,” the leader glared back and shifted his grip on Darcy.
“With pleasure...,” The Winter Soldier replied and before she could blink, the eight tracksuit Draculas were dead. Bullet wounds to their foreheads. Darcy was just wondering why she wasn’t on the ground with them, surrounded by a puddle of her own blood.
“Stay calm and this will all go smoothly, Miss Lewis. I’d rather not have to kill you,” the Winter Soldier holstered his gun and stepped closer to her. Something in his voice was too icy to be trusted so she stepped back at his advance.
“Don’t you touch me! Stay back, you crazy-cut sociopathic mass murderer!,” Darcy grabbed the gun that the tracksuit leader still had on him and pointed it at the Winter Soldier.
“You’re brave, Miss Lewis, I’ll give you that. I’m glad that I have orders to keep you alive. It would be such a waste to kill someone who would challenge me,” he pulled out a syringe from his back pocket and put his hands up in mock surrender, “Plus, you’re cute when you’re angry.”
Darcy had just about enough of his patronizing and shot first so that she could ask questions later. She shot him in the left shoulder, but the bullet sounded like it hit metal and ricocheted. Before Darcy could get another shot in, he was running towards her at full speed.
Her fight or flight reflex kicked in and she ran in the other direction. There was no way she was going to let this idiot kidnap her in broad daylight.
Before she could get thirty feet, the Winter Soldier grabbed her arm and stuck the syringe through her Hulk t-shirt. She waited for the pain of a poison or toxic drug, but all she found was darkness.