Darcy Lewis, as it turns out, is not having a good day.

It starts out with her mother yelling for her to get up because she has 'visitors' at seven thirty in the morning on a Sunday. And by visitors, Darcy means Clint Barton and probably Natasha Romanoff and Kate Bishop.

What they're all doing at her home on a Sunday beats her, but she manages to roll out of bed without killing herself, pull on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and do her makeup in a matter of ten (ish) minutes. She rushes downstairs to find her mother in an intellectual discussion with Kate about needle point or some shit like that.

It's fucking weird, is what it is.

"Oh, hey Darce." Says Clint. All the eyes of the room turn to her.

"Morning." She waves brightly. Contrary to popular belief, once up and awake, Darcy Lewis is very much a morning person. "What's up?"

"We're going for breakfast and decided to take you because you haven't been out in like, ages." Kate states.

"Okay, cool. Glad you guys decided for me."

"Well," begins her mother, "your friends and I have noticed a lot more brooding and general unwillingness to go out since Hot Neighbor moved in two weeks ago."

Darcy groans, while Clint, Kate, Nat, and her mother look like smug little shits.

"Fine, whatever; I'm starving let's go, gang."

Darcy's mother laughs as Darcy's friends and herself say goodbye and make their way out of the house.

Natasha drives them to the local diner. Clint is in the front (because boyfriend privileges or something shitty like that), and Darcy's forced to sit next to Kate who won't stop sticking her ass in Darcy's face while leaning up to be with Clint and Nat (or fiddle with the music; she isn't really sure.)

"Is America gonna join us?" Asks Nat when they're caught in a red light.

"She'll be there."

"I haven't seen her in forever." Says Darcy.

"Probably because you've been drowning in teen-aged angst for the past two weeks over Hot Neighbor."

"Fuck you, Nat; it's bad enough my mother calls me out on my bullshit. Aren't you guys supposed to shower me with love and encouragement?"

"I think you've got those two roles reversed, Darce."

"Shut up, Clint." she murmurs under her breath.

"Anyway," headlines Kate, "We're here! Greasy food – here we come!"

They're early enough that they beat the Church rush, but not so early that they miss it completely. Which isn't usually an issue, except Darcy nearly chokes on her home fries when Hot Neighbor and his equally hot younger sister and Steve Rogers (universe, what the fuck?) walk through the door and sit down at a table in close proximity to Darcy's.

America is the first to notice her friends distress, offering to do the Heimlich if need be. The need was not there, saving Darcy from that level of embarrassment. And then Nat, ever the perceptive one, starts to laugh.

And of course, Nat has, like, the prettiest and loudest laugh in the entire world and – as if Darcy's life can't get any fucking better, Hot Neighbor and company notices Nat.

Nat just waves. Darcy's never wanted to melt into a puddle more in her life – except that's a lie because now Hot Neighbor is walking over to her table. And then Clint tunes in to what's going on and Kate stops lovingly staring at America's face and looks at the approaching man.

"Hey Nat, long time no see!" Hot Neighbor says. His voice is just as pretty as he is; Darcy's trying not to piss herself.

"How've you been, James?" Nat asks with a smirk.

"Not too bad; wasn't expecting to find you in suburban Iowa."

"Yeah, well, you know how it goes. What brings you here?"

"Mom's found a job – pay's good and everything so, we're back. Steve's been nice enough to welcome me and Rebecca, so I really shouldn't hold you up." He smiles. Darcy nearly melts. "See you around, Nat."

"Same to you!" Nat smiles. James (aka Hot Neighbor aka one of Natasha's freakishly pretty friends) takes this time to survey their table before walking back to his sister and Steve Rogers.

"Natasha," Darcy says leaning across the table, "Why do you know Hot Neighbor?"

"When I lived in New York, we lived in the same building."

"That was ten years ago."

"We kept in touch." Nat shrugs, looking back to James who's forcibly keeping his gaze in Steve's direction. Natasha smirks her signature, meddling smirk and suddenly, Darcy's got a pit in her stomach. Kate and America are whispering (loud enough for Darcy to know that it's got nothing to do with sexy times and everything to do with her life). Clint stretches his arms and puts his hands behind his head and grins.

"Don't you fucking dare." Darcy whispers.

"Too late!" Clint says brightly, standing up so that Natasha can get out of the booth and make her way to James' table.

"I hate you guys." She whispers into her hands. There's a hand on her back (America's) and a whisper of 'no you don't' or something to accompany it.

It's apparent that she isn't going to finish her potatoes, so Clint picks at them while Kate and America argue over who's paying the bill.

When Nat returns, she's texting somebody with a tiny grin. She sits down, scowls, because she's noticed that Clint also ate the rest of her food, then breaks out the Good News.

"Darce is throwin' a party tomorrow." She announces.

"No, I'm not?"

"That's not what your mom just told me."

"Okay, you making plans about me with my mom is just, I don't know, weird; someone back me up, please."

"Yeah, I second that." Says Kate, "like, Nat, you and your crazy meddling skill set need to take a chill pill."

"I think that needed to be said like, twenty minutes ago." Says Clint. Natasha glares at him; he puts his hands up in mock surrender.

"As I was saying, our generous friend is hosting a nice little get-together, and I just simply told James and Steve and Rebecca that the invitation was extended to them. And our generous friends mother was informed, and has told me that she has barely a party food in the house, so we're off on a mission."

"You're paying for breakfast." Darcy, America, and Kate say simultaneously.

"Deal." Nat agrees.

America and Kate skip out on the errand running. A good choice, if you ask Darcy, because more terrible things happen to her.

She runs into her ex-boyfriend in the grocery store, catches Nat and Clint making out behind the bread shelf, and drops a case of water on her foot.

In the checkout aisle, she's behind Thor, her friend Jane's boyfriend, who seems to be restocking on condoms while Jane's out of town doing her astrology summer study in New Mexico. The only thing that makes it worse is the small talk that goes on between the two of them.

Natasha is nice enough to clean Darcy's house and help set up for the impromptu gathering. Darcy decides to let Nat clean by herself, because she is not in the mood to prepare to have people over her house. So, she grabs a dog-eared book from the shelf in her living room, and heads outside to her front porch to read while Natasha vacuums. (That's what friends are for, she supposes.)

She doesn't even like this book (it's one of her mother's cheesy romance novels), but when she notices a car pull into Hot Neighbor's (or James's, she supposes) driveway, she acts like she's hot shit and pretends to act like she's enjoying this book.

The act above is easier said than done when the page she's on is easily on the list of "Top Ten Worst Sex Scenes Ever Written". She's torn between laughing, puking, and staying neutral, and she's going for the latter, but it seems option number one is the winner.

Her laugh, is of course, loud and frivolous enough for James and his sister to take notice of her. And plenty more mortifying things happen – like Darcy looks up and waves them and somehow manages to fall out of the chair. How she tears three pages out of her mother's book trying to stand up; how the summer breeze manages to pick said pages up and blow them over into Hot Neighbors yard right onto his feet. How Hot Neighbor picks up the pages, reads them, and laughs (then shows them to his sister, who hits him on the arm).

Today, she dubs, is officially the Worst.

It gets better, though, because not only is he hot, but he's also, apparently, a decent human being and starts walking over to her house with the three pages in hand.

This is bad – so very very bad.

He walks onto her porch, smirk on his face the awfully written smut in his grasp, and hands them over to her.

"I'm so sorry," she gushes turning a rosy shade of pink, "Nat's cleaning the house and I needed something to do because there's no way I'm helping her right now, and this just happened to be the first thing I got my hands on and I promise I don't go around losing pages of my mother's terrible romance novels."

The asshole just fucking laughs – as if her near death experience is somewhat funny to him.

"Don't worry about it, doll." He hands her the pages and she shoves them into the book before throwing it across the porch. He laughs again; she tries really hard not to think about how pretty he sounds (it's not working). He starts to walk away, but before he can, she has something else to say.

"Never did catch your name."

"James Barnes," he smiles lazily, "but my friends call me Bucky. And you?"

"Darcy Lewis."

"Nice to meet ya, Darcy; see you tomorrow?"

"Yep."

He stands there for a moment, not really looking like he knows what to do.

"I should go," he points over to his driveway where Steve and his sister are whispering to each other.

"Yeah, you... do that."

"See you late – fuck!" He swears as he trips off the last porch step. She bites down her laughter while she watches him sprint home. Steve (she's not sure when he showed up) says something to him, Bucky looks over at her, and then back to flip Steve off.

Steve and Bucky's sister just laugh, and Darcy feels like she's missing something important. Either way, Nat's going to want to know about her encounter.

"Natasha!" Darcy yells as she enters the house (she leaves her mother's book on the porch.)

Darcy's party, as it is, is pretty uneventful. Most of her friends show up (well, except for Tony because he's still butthurt about something Steve did like, in the middle of last year).

But anyway, Bucky and Company show up. She meets his sister, Rebecca, who is actually the nicest and prettiest person on the face of the fucking planet, and she and Bucky hold and actual conversation that has nothing to do with the terrible porn page incident that happened the previous day.

By the end of the night, Darcy's sporting a light buzz; Nat and Clint are probably fucking each other in the shed in her back yard, and America and Kate are passed out on the couch in each other's arms (Darcy takes a picture because the two of them are too cute for words.

There are only a few stragglers left – being Kamala, who's making conversation with Rebecca, Peter and Wade who are arguing over something so stupid that it goes right over her head, Peggy, Steve, Sam, Angie and Bucky are all in a group in a corner laughing about some sort of joke that Sam just told, and Wanda's just about ready to kill her brother after he spills beer all over her.

Organized Chaos at its finest.

That is until everyone leaves seventeen minutes later when Darcy's mother tells them to scram because it's three o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday.

Needless to say, people listen to her mother.

She's picking up all the trash on the ground and turning off the emo music that Clint put in the stereo as a joke before she notices that Bucky's stayed around to help her clean up. She tries to tell him she's fine and doesn't need help, but he's ever the gentleman and literally will not listen to her.

Which is a good thing, because she gets most of everything livable in fifteen minutes instead of forty-five.

"Night, Darcy."

"Yeah, mhh, you too, Bucky."

He leaves, and she promptly passes out on the couch next to America and Kate.

Oddly enough, she finds that she and Bucky (and Rebecca) have become fast friends. By the end of June, she's barely going anywhere without Bucky.

And of course, Darcy still has the stupid crush, and of course there's that fun thing called tension and teenage angst and all that fun stuff, but she likes this.

Being friends with Bucky Barnes is one the best decisions she's made.

Now, if she could only stop pining after him, it would be great. Or, if he would, like, admit that he's madly in love with her like some gothic romance novel or something, that would be fucking radical.

But right now, she's stuck in the present, and being friends with Bucky exceeds expectations, and she's absolutely fine with that.

Okay, well, to amend the previous statement, she was okay with that until Steve invited her to his Fourth-of-July-Slash-Birthday shindig and she saw Bucky shirtless.

She knows he's muscly (because she can feel them when he hugs her) but holy crap they are very prominent and large and taut – he probably doesn't even know he's killing her.

Scratch that, he caught her staring, and now he's smirking and looking super Extra about it; he definitely knows what he's doing, which leads her to the sort of confusing conclusion that he might like her.

And, she's still staring; Bucky raises an eyebrow before jumping into Steve's pool.

Darcy's never really been one that's proud of her figure, but Nat assured her that she looked bangin' in her tacky USA bikini before she arrived, and she decides that two can play at his little game.

Of course, in the sake that it turns out that Bucky does not, in fact, like Darcy like that, she's going to go through with this on the purely platonic level of friendship that involves her taking her clothes off and jumping into the pool almost on top of him.

Judging by the look he's giving her as she splashes him in the face, it's probably not platonic.

He grins wolfishly, and picks her up; suddenly Darcy forgets her previous motive and goes for the giggling of someone who's about to get thrown into the water and engage in some serious water warfare.

(Darcy wins, in case you were interested.)

Steve's house is across from the high school, which is where the town sets off the annual fireworks. All his friends (which are most of her friends plus some others) grab blankets and snacks and set up little spots on his front yard to watch explosions in celebration of America (as in the country, and not her friend).

Darcy's ready to watch them by herself – surely expecting Bucky to sit with either Steve or his sister. But he doesn't. He plops his ass down right next to her, wrapping an arm around her like she's someone special, and she leans into him like he matters in a way that he doesn't know he does.

"I thought you'd be sitting with Steve or Rebecca." She says along to the steady pounding of the fireworks.

"Steve's busy getting a birthday present from Peggy; and I think Rebecca would personally kill me if I went over there and scared away Sharon."

"Peggy's cousin?"

"Mhhh." He confirms, "besides," he says casually, "couldn't leave my best girl to watch the fireworks all by herself – that's not right."

Darcy's heart flutters in her chest– she wants it to be more, but she's always been the realist and if she keeps her hopes down, there's no way she can be disappointed.

"Yeah?" she says, though it comes out as more of a question.

"Darcy," Bucky begins, "I sort of want to kiss you."

"Oh?" She's sort of in a state of shock; Bucky Barnes, who she's been mooning over since May when he moved into the house next door to her, who's super out of her league, who's been spending as much time as he possibly can with her, who stayed up with her when she puked her guts out after having too much to drink at one of Nat's parties, wants to kiss her. She's been thinking about this for a while, really, and now that the opportunity's here, she's not really sure what to do (let alone, say).

"Yeah – I mean I understand if you don't want to because, like there's a one-hundred percent chance I've been reading this all wrong –"

"Bucky," she says, carefully. He gulps.

"Yes?"

"I want to kiss you too," she's glad it's dark out so that he can't see her cheeks, "I have for a while now – and, well, it's on my bucket list to be kissed under the fireworks, so I don't know what your waiting for, soldier."

He doesn't say anything, just moves his head so their foreheads are touching; she's smiling and he is too – it's really cute and she really wishes someone had a camera so that she can relive this forever, but she's brought out of that train of thought when his lips brush hers.

She's suddenly acutely aware of how it would be if she were a firework herself. Bucky's kissing her like it's some kind of movie – loving and gentle – and he's cradling her face with his hands (she didn't even notice him unwrap his arm from her shoulder) like she's a precious stone.

His eyes are closed; she can count every freckle, every eyelash on his face and she's glad – he looks so happy and content.

She hopes she never forgets this moment (if she was a hypothetical wizard, and if she was to summon a hypothetical patronus, this would most definitely be her happiest memory).

And, it looks like she doesn't have to worry about forgetting, because America comes up and takes a picture of her and Bucky making out on the little blanket underneath the fireworks. Darcy knows that she'll get the picture eventually, and she's definitely not going to yell at her friend for taking the picture, so she doesn't take her lips from Bucky's.

He opens his eyes, though, and looks around before laughing happily and looking into her eyes.

"I was just thinking," he says softly, "It'd be nice to have a picture of this."

"You're a fucking nerd, Bucky."

"Yeah, well, I guess that makes me your nerd."

She kisses him again, a giggling one, this time – the thrill and terror of the first depleted and replaced with the giddy joy of something unexpectedly welcome, "Sure does."

Title is from a weezer song by the same name

happy new year, loves!