I really enjoyed you all breaking my inbox with keysmashing comments. It does a writer's ego good!
For now, this is the end...
It takes a long time to persuade Bucky to get up from his knees. He seems to find comfort in being close to Darcy, so she promises that she'll stay with him, sitting on the cot.
She props herself tentatively on the edge, while he sets himself beside her, their legs pressed together from knee to hip. She can tell he wants to wrap his arm around her—he fidgets, fingers twitching as if to reach out before curling up and jerking away—but she's too stunned to give him permission.
Dr Adebayo talks to Bucky, less terrified now that the civilizing presence of his soulmate his present.
Bucky's soulmate. Her. It still hasn't settled in. She doesn't understand how it's possible.
The doctor asks about what Bucky remembers: who he is, things he has done, people he knows. Bucky is hesitant, the persistent questions and his inability to answer them frustrating him. She places a hand on his forearm and it seems to settle him. Dr Adebayo notices this too.
"Does Darcy's presence help?"
His brow furrows until he realizes that she is Darcy. He silently repeats her name, before nodding his head firmly.
"Why? Can you remember her?"
It takes Bucky a long time to answer, but the doctor lets the question sit there. "I feel like I know her," Bucky eventually replies. "I don't remember her, not really. Except the way she smells—that's familiar, I think."
"You trust her," Dr Adebayo prompts.
"I do," he says, without hesitation. "And I know she was important."
The doctor looks like he's about to ask another question, but Bucky takes charge of the conversation, turning to her.
"Why were you saying goodbye?" He's only curious at this point, but Darcy throws a panicked look at Steve. She'd forgotten all about her imminent departure.
"I-I'm leaving."
He stiffens. "When are you coming back?"
"It's okay Bucky," Steve cuts in. "If you want Darcy to stay, we can make that happen."
Darcy manages an internal wince. She knows Steve can go over Maria's head, but that will not help her relationship with her boss at all. Darcy needs to be an adult and go plead her case in person.
"I want Darcy to stay," Bucky confirms, relief coloring his voice.
"We can sort that out later," she says, letting Dr Adebayo take over the session again.
When the doctor is done, advising that Bucky gets plenty of rest for the time being, Darcy makes to follow him. Bucky has an arm around her hips before she can scoot off the cot.
"I thought you were staying?"
"I am—here, in the facility," she clarifies. "But I have things to sort out, and you need to rest. Like the doctor advised."
"I don't want to. When I close my eyes—I don't want to."
"Okay, okay." She runs a soothing hand up his arm. "You don't have to sleep just yet. You stay here with Steve, and I'll be back in a little while."
Natasha and Sam are on the other side of the door waiting for her. When it shuts behind her, Darcy casts a glance back through the one-way mirror, to where Bucky is staring forlornly.
"How?" she asks. "I don't get it."
"Google says it's a pretty uncommon scenario," Sam answers, "but it's not unheard of. The likelihood is the memory of him first meeting you is gone for good, but this one he'll never lose."
She contemplates that. It makes a kind of sense, the shock finally lifting and swelling into something she doesn't dare name as happiness. Not yet.
"That's good, I think. It means he'll never be Hydra's again." Of course, it's not a certainty, but could the world be that cruel to them? She bites her lip. "What about his other memories?"
"All we can do is give it time."
"Maria's waiting for you in her office," Nat interrupts quietly.
"Ugh. Come on, let's go get this mess sorted out."
Darcy thanks Sam, and they head away from Bucky's room, to the wing where the offices lie. "Did you know?" Darcy asks Nat as they walk.
"I had an inkling, this morning. Before that, no. It was hard to even hazard a guess at the context of his words."
"So you thought you'd better check if your hunch was right?"
"Hey, don't be grumpy with me. I was only doing destiny's bidding."
"I suppose I can't exactly be ungrateful."
Ungrateful is the opposite of how she's feeling. She owes Nat everything—will probably be hunting for fancy Russian cake recipes to demonstrate her thanks. She'd offer it verbally, or with a hug, but "that touchy-feely stuff" makes Nat squirm.
Maria is surprisingly gracious about Darcy changing her mind, even before the concept of soulmates is brought up.
"I knew you were running away," she says, pulling out some pre-completed forms canceling the transfer. "I'm not exactly sorry you changed your mind; the last thing I need is a miserable assistant in my face all day."
"I understand that I can't work on his missions anymore—"
"Good. Don't worry, there's still plenty of work for you to do."
Darcy doesn't bother unpacking her stuff, grabbing some food and returning to Bucky's 'suite', as Nat has started calling it. He and Steve seem to carrying on a conversation, halting though it may be. Bucky's right behind Steve when Nat opens the door, crowding the space until Darcy is through, wrapping a hand around her wrist to guide her back to the cot.
"Maybe she wants to sit on the chair, Buck," Steve suggests, gesturing the one Dr Adebayo vacated.
"It's okay, Steve, I'll sit with Bucky," she replies, and sees Bucky swallow with relief.
This time she hops up and shuffles until her back hits the wall, her knees bent and feet flat on the mattress. Bucky follows suit, staying hip to hip with her. Steve picks up the conversation again, carefully going over their shared experiences.
Eventually, Darcy begins to grow tired. It's hard to keep track of time in a room with no windows, but her watch tells her it's late into the evening. She's anticipating Bucky's reaction this time.
"I have to go," she says, making no attempt to move. He grips her wrist again, nowhere near tight enough to hurt, and turns wide eyes on her. "Just for the night. I need to sleep."
"You can sleep here," he protests, and she can see Steve having an aneurysm out of the corner of her eye at the suggestion. Bucky's first recovery was characterized by night terrors and lashing out in his sleep, and she knows it's a bad idea to be in the middle of that. Besides, the cot is narrow and barely comfortable enough to sit on.
"I can't," she replies gently, "but I'll be back first thing in the morning. I can bring you breakfast, if you'd like."
His breathing is coming shallower, and she covers his hand with his own.
"Maybe they can give you something to help you sleep?" She raises a questioning eyebrow at Steve and he nods. "You don't have to take it, but it could help keep your mind quiet overnight."
Bucky agrees, placing his trust in her that anything he takes won't do anything but help him sleep. Darcy sits with him while Nat delivers the pill and a glass of water, then until it kicks in and he starts to drift off.
She's back, as she promised, with breakfast, and the days settle into a pattern of visits. She's there nearly all day at first, but soon drops back to see him around her work schedule, staying late into the evenings. Bucky's learned to trust Dr Adebayo, and the two other doctors who rotate duties, and they've already been through this process before so progress isn't as stilted as she expected. The theory about his memory's coming back more quickly this time proves true, though it's in an erratic order.
He remembers simple, seemingly odd things about her at first: the things she has in her living room, bringing her coffee, text message conversations. He remembers more about Steve, but they've forged new neural pathways to those memories before.
Sometimes he takes a sedative to sleep, sometimes he doesn't. On one of the nights he doesn't, she wakes in the small hours to find him curled around her in her bed.
It's the warmth of him that woke her, because his skin throws out so much heat, and she thinks her startled gasp might wake him too. Instead, he just nuzzles his nose into her neck, where his face is buried, tightening his grip on her waist. He seems pretty comfortable. And comatose.
She manages to get a text to Nat letting them know where he is, but nobody's realized he's missing yet. (An investigation later proves that he pulled the old stuffing-the-blankets-with-a-pillow-to-make-it-look-like-I'm-still-in-the-bed-trick and then escaped through the ceiling tiles in the bathroom. He admits that he's been drafting a mental map of the facility based on his memories and used that to find Darcy's quarters. Barton gets blamed for giving him the idea, despite his protests that he hasn't even seen Bucky since he came back). Then his soft breathing lulls her back to sleep in his arms.
The next day, following a hasty evaluation from the doctors, they agree Bucky can move back to his old quarters. It's either that or moving him back the Hulk-proof cell, and that seems a little drastic. Bucky agrees to sleep in his own bed, so he doesn't run the risk of hurting her during a nightmare.
What he doesn't promise to do is not seek her out following a nightmare. When she wakes up with him wrapped around her, she knows it's been a rough night.
She comes back from work one evening and suggests Chinese food. In hindsight, it wasn't the best idea. He only gets flashes, retreating inside himself as he remembers her rejection of him. She has to talk him through the whole sorry tale, so finally he can put the pieces together about why she was saying goodbye to him.
The next day, he's waiting for her, brighter than before. He's remembered more.
"I wasn't going to give up, you know. I was already planning to figure out how to prove that my soulmate didn't matter—that she was an old lady dying in a nursing home, or we'd meet on a mission and I'd never see her again. I was researching all these loopholes to show that I was going to be with you, and only you."
This time, when he asks to kiss her, she lets him. There are no tears this time, just heat and roaming hands.
"I love you," he says when she breaks away, chasing her mouth with his own.
"I love you too," she replies, without hesitation, and his smile is radiant enough to light the entire facility.
He asks to watch footage of their first meeting—the one she remembers—but it doesn't trigger anything. She knew it wouldn't.
"I was pretty rude to you," he comments.
"Yeah, but you made up for it with coffee."
It takes time for him to decide whether he wants to return to active duty. Hydra have been quiet lately, but everyone knows it won't last forever. In the end, he agrees to missions that don't appear to be Hydra-related. The rest of the time, he focuses on getting the recruits trained. No one's a harder taskmaster than Bucky; she hears the grumbles when she drops by the main common room.
He insists on dating her, despite the fact that he has all the important memories involving the two of them back, even if he's hesitant about leaving the base. Instead, he picks her up from her quarters on a Friday evening and takes her for a private meal in the dining suite, or to a movie night in the on-site cinema Tony's had installed. It's after one of these dates—dancing to old records in the deserted Avengers' common room—that he spends the night in her bed for reasons that have nothing to do with nightmares. They wake the next morning, giddy and love-drunk. It's the weekend, and they don't leave her quarters again until Monday morning.
Despite this, he has some surprisingly old-fashioned ideas about the way their relationship is supposed to progress, as she discovers when she suggests he move into her quarters already.
"Definitely not!" he responds, genuinely shocked at the idea. "I can't live with a girl I'm not married to, even if she is my soulmate. My ma would haunt me for it."
The fact that he tells her this while they're pressed together in her bed amuses her.
"Bucky, you sleep here. You shower here. You devour the contents of my fridge and hog my sofa. You already do live here."
"Nah, I'm just here cos it's where you are. All my stuff is still in my quarters."
"So I'm imagining the half-a-rail of clothes in my closet?"
"I like it when you wear my things."
She should have realized he didn't intend to wait all that long before getting a ring on her finger anyway.
One morning her phone calendar chimes with a reminder she can't remember setting. When she opens it, still curled up in bed with Bucky snoring into her neck, it's a simple item, set the year before. Transfer request. One year to the day since she'd made the decision to leave the facility, to avoid heartbreak and look for happiness in other ways. It hadn't exactly panned out how she hoped, but neither had she foreseen this: entwined with the very firm, muscular body of her supersoldier soulmate, their words a matching silver, the same color as the band on the diamond ring she wears. This is peace. This is happiness.
Maybe, finally, the universe is done laughing at her.
Thank you everyone from coming on this ride!
I hope the explanation makes sense. It wouldn't be completely unheard of (victims of amnesia, for example), although I don't think dementia sufferers would be affected by the same rule.
I've already said I will write this from Bucky's POV as well - it won't be as in depth, but it should give some insight into what was happening in his head when Darcy was being frustrating and weird. I thought of the perfect title for it as I was drifting off to sleep the other night, and I didn't write it down because I would *definitely* remember it! (headdesk)
I'm also open to prompts for outtakes if anybody is interested. Send them through my Tumblr (I'm the same name there as I am here).