The day was sweltering with hordes of people out into the city, they celebrate or they mourn, but Darcy feels something akin to numbness as she slides down the familiar alleyway. The power is still out so she knows the cameras are not there to recognize her presence but she knows too someone is watching. Always someone watching.
She pulls the coat tighter, a thick grey wool too heavy for the August heat but she needs the comfort it gives. Her breath is even, heart steady. The choice was made for her with the death of Rogers and Darcy knows that all of her optimistic dreams of the team finding solid ground and coming back together had been blown to shit.
The numbness settles into her bones as she knocks quietly on the steel door, the crowds cheering or yelling, all of it too loud and chaotic for her to understand. The door is pulled open with a rush sucking the dirt around her feet into its darkness.
The man at the door doesn't look her in the eyes, he doesn't need too. There were very few people who knew about this location and those who did never needed to show identity. Darcy still nods a greeting, more habit out of anything and she's not even sure the man sees it but it comforts her anyway.
The swell of voices is cut off with click as the door is closed behind her, taking with it the light of day. She breaths in deeply as her feet carry her away from the heat and into a cool, dark interior. Darcy wants to smile, a comment about these spy people and their dark rooms, but it doesn't reach her face because too much has happened to her heart to make smiling seem like an act of treason.
A familiar face sits with her head in her hands, a table littered with papers and photos and a half empty bottle of amber liquid. Darcy hates this. The sorrow that comes with his death. People everywhere were mourning, words of prayer or wishes of could have's being thrown about. Pointless because you can't undo death but it made them feel better. What would it be like, she mused, to allow herself to feel better using words. Words that had come so easy to her before, now stuck in her throat, thick and bitter and tastes like ash.
But she had to; god, she had to do this.
"I want out of the game." The words spill out in a quiet tumble and the numbness in her shakes. The woman looks up with red eyes and a tight mouth. Maybe to someone who hadn't been in the life would have seen a stony cold face, but Darcy saw pain, raw and new, and it confirmed her choice.
Maria Hill waits a heartbeat before nodding and the tight knot in her stomach loosens. The terms Darcy sets are clear. Death her only option, of a sort, and she tells Hill as much. No one knows if she made it out of the tower, though most had survived. A portion of the gleaming skyscraper that had housed some of earth mightiest heroes had burned during the war between Tony and Rogers… Between Ironman and Captain America.
Darcy had been there that day because of Jane. Her friend, boss, whatever, had been largely ignoring the tension building between the two teammates, instead focused on Thor and his cryptic messages. She understood the woman's interest lies with her heart, but Darcy knew that something terrible was brewing with the Avengers. Lockdown kept her inside its high-end lobby, white walls clean and beautiful and their gaudy splendor. Fire and screams and something that smells like acid frees her.
The second demand she gives Maria has the other woman raising a soot stained brow but she powers on knowing the numbness was settling in again, a void that resided somewhere in the bottom of her stomach.
The country that she'd been born and raised in had used laws and elections and political agendas to tear apart the team, demanding things from both the leaders that opposed. At war with each other, emotions were involved and those in charge only fueled the chaos and pressed and pressured until they broke, leaving so many people hurt and a Captain dead.
Canada offers her a refuge from this place and its anger and corruption, though she hesitates before telling the new director of SHIELD where exactly she wants to go. She thinks that maybe it's best that the other woman doesn't know the specifics and it seems she catches on because she nods once and begins flipping through drawers.
The walls are lined with gray metal cabinets, each with hundreds of thousands of papers, identification cards and birth certificates, some looking old and wrinkled because newly printed ones were too suspicious. Hills starts to pull files and her face becomes less tight as her hands have something to do and her mind isn't on the horrors of what's to come.
The funeral would be tomorrow but she'll be long gone. Darcy knows the numbness will fade and the loss will affect her as well but only in the way that occurs when someone who was close to the people you love dies; it's off and not quite right but the pain is for them and so you'll feel it all.
The minutes pass and she begins to twist the burnt edges of her coat, the crispy black fragments of wool crumbles between the fingers of her left hand and she remembers being so close to the flames. Her right hand was red and raw with bubbles of skin filling with liquid and the coldness in her can't stop this pain because it fucking hurts, but she had managed to wrap it tightly.
It'll be scarred but that she doesn't mind. They all had scars; those people who lived the life.
Hill looks up and her face is no longer closed off, though Darcy only sees the sorrow sitting second to something like respect. It's humbling, the look coming from someone who she herself respects. The feeling falls though, into the pit and she's left with the last request.
Hill argues with her here, and before, Darcy might have yelled and fought with words like weapons, but now she only stares with the numbness in her eyes. The argument dies in Hills mouth and she must see the resolve on her face because moments later Darcy is asked to stand by a spot on the wall.
She doesn't try to smile, but she does her best to conceal the emptiness in her as a picture is taken. It's put through a machine that looks older than her but Hill tells her it's because the technology is untraceable and Darcy nods, waiting.
The room has been designed this way for a reason, and as Hill's hand flies through papers, Darcy feels the void shake but she likes the lack of feeling, at least for now so she grits her teeth. There's a black backpack handed to her and the other woman speaks softly about the roads to take or to avoid. She offers her a car but they both know she won't take it.
They all have to think she's dead. There can be no trace because she wanted out of the game. For the first time in her life, Darcy wanted nothing more than to be alone with no one to care for and no one to die. No more.
The alley is far behind her and soon the city too. The backpack has a good chunk of money in it and she supposes it's all untraceable, which is the whole point of the Room. It's for those who need to disappear after Hell.
So that's what Darcy does. She vanishes into the cold mountains of Canada and stays there. People tend to forget those who were never really important and she fades from memory.
Two years and Darcy believes she is out of the game. She finally fells safe and alone and maybe not happy but she'll get there. And if not, she knows that this is ok. Happiness is for normal people who didn't know what she knew and who could smile and talk and not fear that somewhere in the world someone searches.