Notes: Firstly, I am so sorry this took so long!

I started a new job just after finishing the first story and I discovered that I suck at full-time working along with writing!

But I am trying really hard now and have extra motivation, so I'm going to try and get this story out as soon as I can so that I can get started on my new story idea. I am planning a complete Marvel rewrite, a fusion of MCU, comics, and my own imagination! So look out for that once this story's complete!

But, until then, I hope you enjoy this story!

Through the Storm, We Reach the Shore

Chapter One

Darcy can't sleep. That is a frequent problem amongst the inhabitants of Avengers Tower – which she discovers not too long after moving in. It isn't an uncommon occurrence to find at least one Avenger roaming the tower at 2am. Steve is the most common roamer, with the serum making him require less sleep than most people, on top of what Darcy is assuming are nightmares, judging from the haunted way he looks out of the window sometimes when he doesn't think anybody is watching. Although, Darcy thinks after the first few days that Tony is also up at all hours of the night, just locked away in his workshop away from everybody else.

It has been almost a week since she woke up after the confrontation with Amora. Almost a week since she woke up with an entire new set of memories and emotional baggage. Darcy is twenty-three years old, but she feels so much older. She lived each year twice, it feels like. It's so confusing to have two sets of childhood memories.

She remembers her mothers... both of them. Helen Lewis had died in both lifetimes shortly before Darcy's eighth birthday. The first one – by which she means the one she lost in 1930 – died of tuberculosis, whereas the second died of advanced lung cancer. At least in 1930 she had known who her father was and he was able to take her in. In 1999, Darcy had had no one. The foster system hadn't been as bad to her as it had been to most people. She had been uprooted several times as she was growing up, never staying in one place more than three years, but she was clever. She skipped a couple of grades and got a full ride scholarship to Culver and until she had met Jane, she had been content to keep people at an arm's length. She was all for making friends and going out to have fun, but she never let anyone get too close.

And now she is twenty-three years old with a master's degree in political science and over a decade of practical experience in engineering. Her life had been all figured out, in both lifetimes. She was going to be a mechanical engineer with genius to rival Howard Stark. She was going to work in the White House. And now... She can't do both. She isn't even sure that she could be on par with all the advances in modern engineering. Things have gotten so advanced. JARVIS is a prime example of that. In 1945, artificial intelligence was a faraway dream. It was practically a fantasy. And now she lives in a tower that has several.

Life has gotten about a million times more complicated and she isn't really sure how to think about it at times. But, she supposes, without Amora she wouldn't have Steve.

Steve.

Her relationship with Steve is complicated. He knows that she loves him and she knows that he loves her, but it's just a little awkward. To her, it's been less than a week since he went down in the Arctic. He has had over two years without her.

Luckily, Darcy hadn't been too much of a public figure so there wasn't too much speculation over why she was no longer around Howard, beyond gossip that they had 'broken up'... Which ew. But Darcy had found the old SSR files on her disappearance. They had put a fair amount of effort into investigating her disappearance, especially because it had happened inside a HYDRA base.

Darcy had softly stroked her fingers over the neat cursive handwriting in the file. Peggy's handwriting was so familiar to her. It was comforting, in a way. She doesn't want to think about the state her friend is in right now, in her mid-nineties and suffering from dementia. It's a horrible disease. She knows that she should probably go and visit Peggy at her nursing home, but she also knows that she isn't ready. Not yet. Not to see her friend like that. Maybe that's a little selfish, but until she can handle it, at least a little, it would be unfair to Peggy.

This particular night, less than a week since she woke up, Darcy doesn't even attempt to sleep. She knows it would be useless. She has barely slept at all and what sleep she manages to have is plagued by nightmares and confusing memories that blend together so that she can hardly tell which memory came from which lifetime. This is a problem that plagues her waking moments as well. There are a lot of vague memories that come to her that she finds hard to place in either timeline and she agonizes over it. It may not seem important to most people, but Darcy is determined to get her mind straight. Her life is so much more confusing now. Maybe if she solves this then everything else would fall into place.

She wanders around the tower. She knows that JARVIS would keep her out of anywhere potentially dangerous, so she doesn't worry about it. She feels like an artificial intelligence watching her every move and controlling almost all aspects of her surroundings should worry her, but it doesn't. Maybe it would have done, before. But now, she can appreciate the remarkable feat of engineering that allowed JARVIS to come into being.

Luckily for her, she isn't entirely behind when it came to modern technology, as someone straight from the 1940s might be. Darcy is a twenty-first century girl as well, after all. She knows her way around a computer and is quite good at hacking and basic programming. She had been with a foster family for two years when she had first started high school. There had been another girl there when she first arrived, and she was scarily good with computers. Even at fourteen years old, she had been able to hack into most places and create some fairly impressive computer programs from scratch. She liked to entertain Darcy by creating little games that they could play together. The girl had been more than willing to pass on her knowledge of the subject and, as always, Darcy had been eager to learn, despite being a little over two years younger.

Sadly, the girl was sent to a different home seven months after Darcy arrived. This left a twelve-year-old Darcy in high school who, having skipped a couple of grades, was with children at least two years older than her who just couldn't relate to her at all because she understood things faster than they did. It wasn't Darcy's fault that she grasped concepts easily, or remembered things far better than most people. It was just the way her brain worked.

By the time she started ninth grade they tried to skip her ahead again, but she refused. It wasn't fair. She might be bored in some of her lessons, but it beat being set even further apart. She was already snubbed by her classmates. She wasn't sure she could go through it again. She dreaded to think what the tenth graders would have done with a twelve-year-old sharing classes with them.

Darcy joined local clubs to make friends her own age when her social worker started worrying about her social life. One of the clubs that she joined was an amateur theater group. While in it, she learned the importance of improvising, of reading the people around you and anticipating what they were going to do next. She learned about body language and how to portray one things outwardly while inside you were feeling completely different. She learned how to get by as a foster kid. Because that was how you survived, essentially. You had to prove that you were doing absolutely fine, even if you weren't.

That home only lasted two years and after the first seven months, it wasn't the same. Not while she was alone. The couple that were fostering her didn't take on any more foster kids while Darcy was with them, which was odd to Darcy. She had had a fair few foster homes and there was rarely only one kid. She supposed it was because most people were in it for the money. But she learned, shortly before her fourteenth birthday, that the couple had only taken Darcy on as a favor to her social worker and kept her longer than they intended. They were getting older, and wanted to get out of the fostering game. Darcy couldn't blame them. Fostering was hard work, especially when your kid has a bundle of issues. She only wished that they could have hung on for just a couple more years.

It meant that halfway through high school she was moved into a group home in another district. It's harder to place a teenager. People want little kids. They don't want an unruly teenager from the 'system' stomping through their house. The rules were stricter and the kids were tougher. These kids had been through a lot. It was the kind of facility where the cutlery was counted at the end of every meal to make sure that no weapons were taken back to the bedrooms.

But Darcy got through it. She got a full ride scholarship to Culver University when she was sixteen years old and completed her undergraduate degree in three years… Well… almost. There had been a slight mix up in the system, with Darcy taking extra classes to condense the length of her course and just when Darcy thought that she would be graduating, she discovered she was six credits short and missing a science requirement. Darcy was nineteen years old and she really didn't want to go back to college for an entire year just to catch up on her science requirement. It was incredibly lucky when one of her professors, Dr. Selvig, recommended that she apply for an internship with the daughter of one of his colleagues. Dr. Foster was an astrophysicist and as Darcy thumbed through her research one night, she was pretty impressed. It was almost all theoretical, but if any of it could be proven, Dr. Foster would be respected worldwide.

Based on the research and what little Selvig had said, Darcy imagined Jane Foster to be a stern, middle-aged woman who didn't know how to have fun.

She was proven wrong on the first two points the moment she had been introduced, and proven wrong on the third by the end of the first week when she managed to drag the doctor away from her calculations and to the only bar in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico. Jane Foster was a tiny woman and by the third tequila shot, she was she danced like a maniac. Darcy managed to get the tiny woman back to the trailer that they were sharing and put her to bed with the same efficiency she had been using all week.

Darcy learned not to put up with any of Jane's shit and the length of time spent arguing the astrophysicist into eating got shorter as time went on until, at times, only a well-placed glare could do the job. She also learned that, as much as the other woman soon liked her as a person, Jane did not respect her chosen degree and constantly underestimated Darcy's intelligence and ability to understand the science and math that was integral to Jane's everyday life. And Darcy soon found she preferred it that way. It was nice, not having any expectations on her. She had always been pushed to succeed, once her teachers and social workers had found out how clever she was. With Jane, she could just be a normal nineteen-year-old girl… with an awesome fake ID she had gotten halfway through her undergrad. In fact, her ID was so good Darcy isn't entirely sure that Jane knows her real age.

But now, it's four years later. Thor happened, and then he disappeared again, only to show up six months later when aliens attacked New York. Darcy watched it on TV in Norway while Jane tried desperately to get through to SHIELD on her cell to demand that they take them back home. By the time SHIELD acquiesced, Thor was gone again and it was almost two years before he dropped back into their lives, quite literally.

After the Chitauri attack, Jane was close to accepting SHIELD's offer to come work with them when Pepper Potts had walked in with an offer that Jane couldn't refuse, as well as a job for Darcy as Jane's assistant. It wasn't exactly the way Darcy had pictured her life, but her internship was just about to end, and it was the best option she had at the time. Two years later, and Darcy is still, technically, assistant to an astrophysicist.

She had studied for her Master's degree while she was in New York, working at the lab space that Stark Industries had set them up in Greenwich Village made the commute to NYU really convenient. And, as much as she didn't respect Darcy's chosen course, Jane made it to both of Darcy's graduations.

With her qualifications, Darcy knows she could get a really good job in politics. But she also knows that Jane can barely survive without her. She had been gone for less than two days once, just to cram for her finals with some friends, and when she got back, Jane was nibbling on a stale pop tart that Darcy had left for her before she left and there were twenty-six paper cups littered around the lab, with varying amounts of leftover, cold, coffee. Darcy had banned proper mugs in the lab back in Puente Antiguo, after slicing her foot open on the second smashed mug. That was also when she banned bare feet in the lab.

Like she's going to have to ban bare feet in the tower, she realizes, as she stubs her toe on a quiver of arrows that Clint left in the middle of the hallway.

Over the last few days, Darcy found herself discovering more and more about the Avengers' habits. Her late-night wanderings had led her to discover the messes that the team just leaves lying around.

Tony is the worst for it. Darcy can always tell where Tony's been because he leaves a trail of stuff behind him. When he's preoccupied, he'll search for something and pull things out of drawers while he's doing it and then, once he's found it, he'll go stumbling back to his lab and leave drawers wide open with their contents spilling out.

Clint likes to leave weapons everywhere. He claims that, if there's an emergency, he can get to them quickly. He's just never puts them anywhere convenient. They're always in somebody's way. Darcy's almost certain Natasha has weapons everywhere too, she's just a lot subtler about it.

Natasha's problem is clothes. She's very comfortable with her body and, Darcy is sure, a bit of a troll. So, if she needs to shower, she starts stripping off while she's on her way, regardless of where in the tower she is or who is with her, and she just leaves the clothes where they drop, ignoring the astonished looks of the rest of them – besides Clint, who must be very used to it after all this time.

Thor and Bruce have a similar problem. They break things. Not intentionally. Midgardian furniture and appliances aren't really made for Asgardian strength. And there's little that can stand up to the Hulk when he's even mildly irritated.

Steve, though… Steve doesn't really make a mess. As much as she can tell, Steve spends most of his days tidying up around everyone else, as he used to when they were in her lab together. If he's around, he's the one who picks up Natasha's clothes and deposits them in a laundry bin. He moves Clint's arrows out of the way, shuts the drawers Tony leaves open, and arranges for people to replace whatever Thor or the Hulk broke. It's Steve, the earliest riser, who she caught on the first morning tidying everybody's messes up before going on his morning run.

But, from what Darcy gathers, Steve's not always around. Natasha implied that this is the longest Steve has stuck around since SHIELD fell, although she wouldn't say why. Darcy will find out, though. She's not worried about that.

She wanders into the kitchen around 2AM, craving coffee but knowing that it'll have to be decaf if she still harbors any hope of sleeping. Really, she craves a good whiskey, a habit that seems to have followed her from growing up with Howard, but there's a noticeable lack of alcohol in the tower. Darcy knows that Tony used to have a drinking problem; was fairly well known for it in the media. Maybe this is him doing better?

Darcy just grabs the jar of decaf from the shelf when she hears a noise behind her. She whirls around and sees Steve in the doorway.

"Oh, hey," she says, awkwardly. "You're up late. Either that or you've got up even earlier than usual."

Steve shrugs and comes more into the room, pulling up a stool at the breakfast bar. "Who needs sleep?" He sits down heavily and slumps, leaning against the counter.

"I'm making coffee," she tells him. "Decaf. You want some?"

He looks up and their eyes meet, just for a moment.

"Sure," he says, looking away. "Thanks."

She spends a few minutes with the coffee machine. It isn't Gloria, but it's decent enough. She thinks about what she read, in that moment, in Steve's eyes. Weariness. Guilt. Pain.

She settles the cup of coffee in front of him and pulls up her own stool next to him, taking a sip from her own cup.

"Nightmare?" she guesses.

He jerks, minutely, next to her in surprise and she knows that she guessed right.

She doesn't say anything else; just lets him find his own words.

"It's different every time," he murmurs. "Sometimes it's Bucky. That moment when he fell… it just plays over and over again on a loop. Sometimes I feel the cold, and it's like I'm drowning. Sometimes it's you," he says, honestly. "I used to imagine you coming to some horrible fate and you would be there, blaming me for not being there, for not saving you. And seeing you hit by that spell and get knocked out, and having to wait days for you to wake up, not knowing whether you even would?"

He takes a ragged breath, trying to steady himself.

Darcy puts a hand on his arm. "I have nightmares too, you know." Steve turns to look at her and their eyes meet again. "Why do you think I've taken to wandering the tower at all hours? Not for my health. I don't go into all that step-counting fitness crap."

That rips a laugh from Steve's throat that seems to surprise even him.

"I dream about you, too," she tells him. "I dream about that moment when the radio cut off and I knew you were going to die. I dream about you never coming back from Austria when you went to rescue Bucky. I dream about… God…" She trails off and tears come to her eyes, no matter how much she tries to will them away. "I dream about Howard, and Dum Dum, and Gabe, and all of them. They died and I wasn't there. And Peggy. I dream… God, Steve, it sounds so bad, but I am so terrified. I want to see her, but what if she doesn't remember me? What if I go see her, expecting to see my best friend, and she's just not there? What if I confuse her and it harms her? I don't want to hurt her just because I selfishly want to see her!"

Tears are falling freely now, but Darcy no longer cares.

"I stay awake because I don't want to sleep. It's too horrible."

Strong arms settle around her and she leans forward into Steve's broad chest. One hand rubs up and down her back as she cries and the other settles in her hair. He presses a kiss to her hair.

"We're a mess, aren't we?" he murmurs.

Darcy huffs a laugh through her sobs, which gradually fade out, leaving her exhausted.

"Let's go watch some TV and not-sleep together," she suggests.

Steve smiles, softly. "Sounds like a good idea."

And, when she wakes up the next morning, Steve curled around her on the couch, she hasn't had a single nightmare.