Part 1:
Darcy
"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard." - Anne Sexton
Darcy figured she must be crazy.
That's the only explanation that stuck. Every snippet of that something that she kept in the back of her mind, she never told anyone about.
Not her parents, not her friends growing up.
Not any boy she had in her bed.
The few boys she let get that close to her, she never told them the truth, that every kiss and touch was compared to something she couldn't quite put a finger on.
The lingering suspicion she had when she lost her virginity that she'd done this before. She knew it was impossible, so she put that down to some kind of insanity she could never admit to.
The visions she had, the splices of something, were too vivid to be just her imagination. These weren't things she pretended she was seeing.
She saw hands, smiles, lips that she kissed in her dreams. She'd wake with her hand down the front of her panties and felt sad and alone.
How could she suffer from heartache that she couldn't rightly place?
And yet she did.
So she grew up confused, mostly. About her place in the world, about where she belonged. She was a flaky, drifting girl.
And as a young woman she wasn't any more settled.
She met Jane and Erik and felt herself become… close.
Close to just being.
After Thor left for the second time, she and the intern moved in together.
But it didn't last. Like everything else in Darcy's life.
She wasn't too bitter about it, but missed the excitement Thor brought. The terrifying thrill of every moment that made her forget the confusing pictures, the strange dreams.
So when Jane decided she was going to move to New York and work with Tony Stark after all, Darcy said yes the second Jane finished her sentence.
To hell with whatever other safer opportunity that could possibly pop up.
But when she met Captain America, face to face, he did a double-take.
"Darlene?"
Darcy felt her heart hammering, it roared in her ears.
"Her name's Darcy," Jane corrected, looking confused, if not a little annoyed her assistant's name hadn't been properly remembered since she only introduced her a moment before.
Rogers, Captain America, Steve – whatever Darcy was supposed to call him – faltered, gaping a little.
"I'm sorry. You just look so much like someone I know."
Darcy blinked.
"Someone I knew," he amended.
A fleeting look of realising this Darlene he knew was dead, like everyone else he knew from the 1940s. He quickly concealed his grief for their sakes, Darcy suspected.
"I'm sorry."
He left without another word, and Darcy felt like crying.
She couldn't figure out why.