Summary: Tipping over the edge...
Notes: Hi guys! Next chapter time! I'm so glad you're all enjoying this! Please keep those ideas coming, I love you all! And I'm so glad Max went over so well! When in doubt, just add a puppy, huh? Anyway, let me know what you think or if there's an idea you'd like incorporated. Enjoy. PS-Chapter title taken from-you guessed it-the song of the same name by Richard Marx. Go ahead and laugh, but I seriously grew up listening to that guy and my love for that song has not diminished. Maybe it comes off as cheesy now, but I thought the whole thing related really well. Enjoy!
((()))
Bucky jerked, the odd sensation that he'd been only half conscious floating through his mind as he looked around, bleary and confused.
A dark green couch, fairly threadbare, but comfortable sat across from him. He looked around. Coffee table in the middle. He was in the only other seat in the room, an ancient armchair with a padded seat. Frowning, he shifted his weight.
Sure enough, it creaked on the right-hand side.
The heat register knocked and he looked up to study the deep window ledge, afternoons reading in the warm sun drifting back to him, the latest paperback from the five-and-dime.
Jerking again, he turned, twisting around to look behind him.
The kitchen, sure enough, with the oven that only worked half the time, and the ice box.
His and Steve's old apartment.
How the hell had he wound up in the living room of their old apartment? God, he hadn't been here in…a warm rush of nostalgia and fond affection flooded him.
It wasn't even standing anymore. The building had been replaced by…
He sat bolt upright.
What the fuck was going on?
He reached up.
Hair still long. He hadn't shaved the day before. He looked down.
He was in hospital gear, loose white pants and a t-shirt, some sort of linen/cotton blend that was less than comfortable.
He swallowed.
How the hell…?
Creaking on the outer landing made him jump about a foot, and he froze as the door opened and he was met with the strangest sight he thought he'd ever seen; this was really saying something.
"You don't think I can do it. That's what this is about. You don't think I'm strong enough." Steve was saying as they came in the front door. Well. Not Steve. Other Steve. He was small—smaller than Bucky remembered—a foot shorter than him and half as wide in his trench coat.
He tried to brace himself for what he knew was next…
"Stevie, I'd be an idiot if I didn't think you were stubborn enough to go out and do whatever the hell ya pleased. But this isn't some back alley fight, man. This is war. People die in wars," a strangely unfamiliar voice said. It was funny, he thought, that your own voice sounded different when you weren't hearing it from inside your own head.
Bucky sat there, watching himself come over the threshold in his jumpsuit, hair short again, and slicked back the way he wore it. One short strand had fallen loose over his eyes. He came in and shut the door behind them.
"Yeah, I know that, Buck. That's why I wanna go."
Other Bucky sighed. "And that's exactly why you shouldn't go."
A young Steven Grant Rogers slid off his coat and hung it on the peg by the door. "Hitler's closin' in, Buck. You expect me to just sit here while—"
"Nothing's even happened yet, Stevie. You're jumping the gun. So he's makin' noise about Poland. Just hold your horses, alright?"
Steve threw himself down on the couch and huffed a deep sigh. "I'm just sayin'—don't expect me to sit here like some housewife and wait for you to come back from the trenches."
He laughed, unzipping the jumpsuit to reveal the worn tank he wore beneath it. "Careful, Stevie—you don't want people findin' out I sleep in your bed in the winter." He winked. "The gals'll think we got somethin' goin'."
Steve rolled his eyes. "Yeah, like I can get a gal."
"Don't mean I can't." He grinned. "Stevie, I don't need a housewife. I just want you to be safe." He crossed into their shared bedroom—where the wallpaper was worn and peeling in the corner and Steve's bed creaked when he turned over and kept Bucky awake at night.
"You're a jerk, you know that?" Steve called after him.
He reemerged, buttoning his slacks and shaking his head, frowning at the grease on the back of his right hand. "And you're a punk. You wanna start that again? Don't think I don't know what this is about."
Steve scowled down at his lap. "Don't know whatcha mean."
Bucky snorted and perched on the arm of the couch. "I'm not lettin' you join Sarah that easy, punk. You're stuck here with me until you're old and gray."
The future Captain America pulled a face. "Rate I'm goin', shouldn't take long…"
He chuckled. "I intend to keep my best friend healthy as a horse long as I can. Hey—" He clamped down on Steve's shoulder and shook him. "I mean it. You're stuck with me. Remember what we said that day?" Standing beside Sarah's casket. "'Til the end of the line."
Shaking uncontrollably, Bucky lunged up out of the armchair and threw himself at the doorway, not particularly surprised when neither of the shades in the room seemed to notice his presence. With unsteady hands, he tugged on the doorknob and tripped into the hallway, short of breath and desperate to get out before he heard anymore. It clicked shut behind him.
Holy fuck, he was living his own memories, now? What the hell happened and when had he fallen into a lame remake of It's a Wonderful Life?! When Darcy had shown him the flick last Christmas, it'd made him distinctly uncomfortable. They'd agreed afterward that it was depressing and decided never to watch it again, no matter how awesome Jimmy Stewart was. She'd giggled and put on The Muppet Christmas Carol instead, declaring it her personal favorite.
Darcy.
Hand over his racing heart, he looked up the hallway, something like homesickness piercing his chest. "Darce?" he called, trying to suppress the ugly thing rising in him that could only be called yearning.
His call echoed.
He frowned. "Dollface…"
Nothing.
In fact, the hallway looked familiar, but…not in the same way the apartment had. The apartment—while eerie and disconcerting in its own rite—had filled him with a warm rush of memories. This hallway…this hallway did not.
How had he gotten from there to…to here?
Dread began to swirl in the pit of his stomach. "Darce? Babe?"
His heart was racing and he reached up to swipe his hair out of his face. He'd need a trim, soon. He liked it a little longer now, but he didn't want to be ridiculous; he was no girl.
Darcy. Darcy liked to run her fingers through it; said it was buttery soft and liked to laugh when he reacted to having it pulled.
What was the last thing he could remember?
Think, Bucky, think.
He remembered…Darcy had a tracking device implanted deep…somewhere. Where was it? A vein? No. Her lung. No, that wasn't right either.
Bruce had explained it, and Tony. It was how they'd tracked them—tracked them all the way from Hawaii.
Another shard of homesickness ground into his sternum and he frowned, clenching his jaw. He wasn't sure what he'd give to be back there, with her, in Tony's beach house, with nothing to worry about but getting in a swim in the morning in the salty water—but he was pretty sure it would be a lot at this rate.
Back in the War, he'd had a hard time imagining having a girl to come home to, someone waiting for him to come back—and all in one piece. He'd been in no place, then, to leave a girl waiting on pins and needles.
Now.
He wasn't sure where he was—how he was—but he was sure that he needed to get back to Darcy.
That sense of dread was tightening in his gut, but he went slowly down the hall, opening doors as he went, finding them blessedly empty—
Until his luck ran out.
George Barnes looked exactly the same as he had in his memory, finally renewed after all these years.
Even the look of bleary drunkenness was exactly as Bucky remembered it, his red-rimmed eyes and his look of hazy disapproval.
He froze, his hand on the knob as they locked eyes.
George sneered. "Well, if it ain't my good-for-nothin' son. 'Bout time you showed up, Jimmy."
((()))
If someone had asked Darcy a year ago if she thought she'd seen everything, she may have considered saying 'yes'. After all, she'd been chased down by a fire-breathing robot from space and subsequently saved by a Norse God with flowing blond hair. And then again, from a very un-Tolkien-esque elf in a London borough. Not to mention she was newly working for a man who flew around in a metal suit with his friendly Artificial Intelligence butler, or that she was best friends with a man who could throw a car, or that she was dating a former brain-washed Soviet assassin capable of killing someone with his small left pinky finger.
But now she'd have felt foolish.
Because seeing an extremely good-looking maybe-sorcerer use his hands to project a three-dimensional image of her husband's brain onto a holo-screen…was perhaps the strangest thing she'd ever seen.
Maybe.
Centers in Bucky's brain pulsed and lit up as she watched, his brain stem a constant blink of electrical activity, his lobes different shades of dim and bright.
No, definitely. This was definitely the strangest, bar none.
"Is it okay if I think this is a little creepy?" Bruce muttered a few feet away, leaning into Tony's shoulder.
"Totally normal," Steven Strange said as he frowned, studying the image. He sighed, lifting his free hand to turn the hologram, his other suspended in the air—eerie glowing symbols dangling from his fingers like collectible glittering pendants—keeping the image sustained.
"I don't think 'normal' is a word I would use here, under any circumstances," Darcy piped up, cradling Max in her lap. "Are you seriously projecting my husband's brain right now? Seriously."
Strange snorted. "I am, to be fair. It's entirely safe, not to worry."
She stared at his perfectly trimmed sideburns. "Not worried. Not worried at all." She blinked. "So what's up—is he blocked in his Cerebral Cortex or in his Hypothalamus?"
"Two completely opposite sections of the brain," Tony interjected.
Strange smirked, glancing at her with a curious frown. "You're familiar with centers of the brain?"
She shrugged. "Wasn't really trying, just being snarky. But I was pre-Med for about five minutes."
"Really?!" Bruce jerked around to give her a suddenly fascinated sort of look, like she'd just stated the puppy in her lap was for him.
Tony turned to give her a funny look as well, as though he was surprised she'd revealed something he didn't know about her.
She shrugged again. "I repeat: five minutes."
Strange smiled as he turned back to his work. "What turned you off?"
"The fact that there was no effing way I was going to school for twelve effing years. Well, that, and my father would've just loved being able to say he had a neurologist for a daughter."
Bruce wilted a little.
Tony snorted.
"So, yeah. Political Science became my new best friend."
"Quite the leap," the sorcerer said, smiling again as he turned the hologram for a new angle.
"How long did those five minutes last?" Bruce inserted.
She sighed, burying her fingers in Max's thick fur. "Eh. Some Biochem and Psych courses. Physics. The Zoology class was good. And I was the only girl who went back for that nasty second-term morgue visit and didn't yak."
Bruce absolutely beamed at her.
Tony's crooked expression tightened further. "Wait. You've got physics experience?"
She raised an eyebrow. "How do you think I follow a good quarter of what you're talking about, Boss Man?"
He just stared at her.
"Psychology, hm?" Strange asked.
"Yeah."
"Interesting."
She leaned forward, suspicious of Max, and grabbed his shoulders before he could make the leap to the floor again. "Why?"
He just bent closer to Bucky. "Oh, never mind." He sighed. "Alright, well. He's got a block."
Darcy jerked. "I was kidding."
Strange straightened and gave her that same considering look. "Well, you were right."
Bruce stepped forward. "Where?"
He straightened his cloak. "That's the thing—everywhere. His mind is entirely locked inside itself."
((()))
Bucky slammed the door shut, knee-jerk reaction, his father's face disappearing from view.
Horror lanced through him. He hadn't seen his father since at least a year before the War, and that parting had been less than cordial. He'd done the thing that you just didn't do back then, he'd broken the ultimate rule: he'd turned his back on his family.
George had become intolerable and his mother weak, just watching it all unfold with her mouth zipped shut.
He'd done his best—but usually your best wasn't enough.
"Jimmy?"
He whipped around, ice filtering through his blood as he set eyes on a ghost that had been haunting his subconscious for quite some time now, particularly these last few weeks since Hawaii.
Becca.
Exactly as she'd been when last they'd spoken, her brown hair pulled back in a knot at the base of her skull, a plaid dress, her buckle shoes.
Words stuck in his throat as he stared at her like he'd been slapped.
Her milk-white face scrunched up in misunderstanding and a tear slipped down one cheek. "You never came home," she murmured.
He took an unconscious step back, opening his mouth to speak, though, still, nothing came out.
Her voice grew in strength as she shadowed him, her small hands fisting at her sides. "You promised me you'd come home, Jimmy."
The accusation was clear in her tone, the betrayal and bitterness slicing a clean etching across the surface of his heart—the confession that had been coating the back of his throat since her presence had taken on a clearer foundation in his mind.
Swallowing reflexively, he took another step in retreat, still trying to speak, but this time, when he tried, no sound came out, as though the words had been carved from his tongue.
She advanced on him, rapidly, reaching out to loop her fingers around his wrist.
He snatched his arm back.
"Why didn't you come back, Jimmy? You promised." Another tear. "You promised me—remember?" She reached up suddenly and slapped a hand to his chest and he stared in blank shock that she was able to make physical contact at all.
She wasn't just a phantom.
"You promised!"
"I—" he stammered.
She slammed her small fist again into his sternum. "Why would you make a promise you couldn't keep?! Instead you left me with them!"
He started darting back, down the hall behind him, blindly reaching for the far wall, where his old bedroom had been—if it was still where he'd left it in his mind, of course. "Bec—"
"You left me with them! With him! You promised you'd come back for me!"
Her face was a mask of bitter anger and disappointment, sharp in its betrayal, and a bruise formed around the apple of her left cheek as he watched.
"You left me. With him! Were the Germans too interesting for you, Jimmy?!"
Her words sliced through him like a straight razor, horror and awful guilt welling up in the wound and seeping past his numb shock.
Had the Army not told them anything?! Had they just left him MIA for the last few decades?! "Becca, I didn't—"
"You didn't what?! You didn't think about me at all, did you?!"
His hand landed on the doorknob and he fumbled at it blindly behind his back.
"You just went gallivanting off with Steve! You promised me you'd come back! So why didn't you?!"
He finally fumbled the door open and threw himself backward through it.
((()))
The Common Room in Avengers Tower, it turned out, was a good place to brood.
Darcy discovered this by accident, really, wandering the halls after Strange's consultation, with Max at her heels, glaring suspiciously at anyone who dared to pass too closely to his new human.
As if she needed another reason for people to give her a wide berth.
But she didn't really notice, the only thought in her head that she was fresh out of wine and that she knew Tony kept a few bottles of her favorite stashed in the back of the fridge there, where no one ever spotted it.
When she turned away from the fridge, she found Max perched on the back of an armchair that someone had pushed up to face the view, the opposite side of the one in their own suite and much higher—the Common Room was on one of the top-most floors to make for a drop-dead party space. She sighed as she took in the wide Manhattan panorama. It was late afternoon—just late enough to shamelessly drink—and the light was slanting at a sunny diagonal across the glass. "Wow, Max. Good eye." She poured half a glass, set the bottle on the counter to take with her later, and sat down to join him.
He curled up in her lap, heaved a great big contented puppy sigh, and nodded off.
She smiled. The true sign of trust and comfort—the deep sigh.
She'd recognized it in Bucky fairly early, and it had made her heart expand three sizes too big, like the fucking Grinch. The fact that he had felt so quickly comfortable with her had given her a strange warmth that she hadn't quite understood then.
She recognized it now, of course, as just the opening salvo to a quick and dramatic trip head over heels that still left her a little breathless. If half of Bucky Barnes had swept her off her feet so easily, she could only begin to imagine what he'd been capable of back then, under the charm of his full power.
He'd slept with her. Well, not the sex part, not that early, but the fact that he'd felt safe enough with her, secure in his trust of her, to allow himself to fall unconscious spoke volumes about their bond, the knot of feeling that drew them together.
If she sat still enough, if she allowed her heart to slow and her feelers—as she'd taken to calling them—to edge just a little bit out of their hidey-holes, she could almost feel him.
No, she knew she could.
She could feel him, just there, on the other side of the veil, treading water, grasping at the curtain and desperately searching for the way back through, like a poor, helpless soul who'd fallen through a hole in the ice and gone topsy-turvy, unable to find the exit again.
His heart was beating. And he was looking for her. She could feel him looking for her, could feel him trying to reach out for her.
But it was dim wherever he was, and difficult to see around whatever illusion he'd been forced into.
Before the yearning could claw its way up her throat and overtake her, she swallowed it back down again, and focused on the spectacular view out the window. There was a balcony, but the wind was high up here and she didn't fancy a headache, nor did she think Max would appreciate being stuck in here without her. He'd quickly taken to her like glue.
He sighed again in his sleep and readjusted his head on her lap.
Darcy exhaled long and deep, too, sipping her wine and rolling it around on her tongue, painfully aware of the irony of her circumstances—her need to get drunk and stay that way for a few days was becoming rather acute, and yet she was resolutely unable.
Probably a good thing, really.
"I'm assuming you're aware that the Super Soldier Serum cancels out your ability to get blackout drunk," a voice spoke suddenly from the doorway.
She whipped around, Max growling in her lap, to find Stephen Strange hovering in the doorway.
Well, he wasn't literally hovering—she checked. "And I'm assuming you're aware that sneaking up on people while they're brooding usually scares the shit out of them?" she fired back, giving him a wry look.
Truth be told, if she weren't so devoted to her Jamie, she'd be looking twice at the sorcerer in front of her—although he struck her as already carrying a torch for someone not quite within reach. But he was handsome, and he had sad eyes.
Whatever the fuck was inside her was starting to creep her out. Who knew just what had happened when the two serums had merged. Maybe she was some sort of weird empath now.
He shrugged and strolled slowly into the room, unhooking his cloak as he walked. "Still getting used to it."
As she watched, he let go of the garment—and it floated, on its own, over to the nearest chair and settled itself over the back.
She blinked, not particularly fazed, but intrigued none-the-less.
"It's enchanted."
She nodded. "Of course it is."
He smiled as he came further into the room. "Listen, I know that…in your realm of science fiction, this looks like something out of a child's magic show—"
"No, no. I'm down with it," she interrupted. "I'm just…adjusting my worldview."
"Again," he inserted.
"Right."
Max sat up and peered over her shoulder at the sorcerer.
"Your dog thinks I'm strange."
"Can you…like, communicate…or something?"
He snorted. "No. Just a guess."
She nodded again. "Right. Just checking."
He stood close to the window, taking in the view, and for a moment, it was comfortably quiet. "So you thought you'd come up here to brood, is that it?"
She gave him a bitter smile and held up her wine glass, stemless and quickly warming in her palm, mellowing the drink within. "I've learned from the best."
A sad smirk curled one side of his mouth. "I suppose I would expect him to have mastered the art more than anyone else here, that's true. From what I've heard of him, anyway."
She sighed.
He turned to look at her, again, with those sharp, cunning eyes of his. "Is he as ruthless as they say?"
She blinked at him, a little surprised at his candor. "Well." She swallowed. "The Winter Soldier was. They…made him to be. But…" She wasn't sure how to continue, or if she wanted to.
"Not James Barnes," he finished for her.
To her horror, tears welled up in her eyes before she could gather them back under control, and she sat there, staring at him, refusing to let a single one fall. "No."
He nodded, looking back out the window.
She blinked rapidly, swallowing the pain back down again, wrestling it back into its steel cage, where she kept it, safe and secure and out of sight of everyone else. "I mean, if you piss him off enough, you'll probably regret the fact that he's got a metal arm, but…" She cleared her throat.
Another wry smirk. "His bark is worse than his bite."
"Right."
She sipped at her wine and focused everything she had into the tart bite at the back of her mouth, tingling on her tongue. Bucky had said once, in a quiet moment, in the dark of their room, that it tasted different on her mouth, not hard, but sweet and soft.
She wasn't sure why the hell she was telling all this to a near complete stranger, but suddenly she couldn't stop. "He's not the monster everyone thinks he is. He's…sweet. And quiet. And it bothers him that he can't be who he was. I think. He's never…said as much. But…"
He turned that pale blue gaze on her again. "He misses the man he used to be."
She sighed. "I'm…not sure what it is. I mean, other than the obvious. I'm…not sure he liked who James Barnes was either. But if he's not James anymore, and he's not…The Asset"—it burned on her tongue and turned to ash—"I don't think he knows where that leaves him. He's spent the past year trying to revive whoever that was that he left behind but…I think it's occurring to him now, that…that puzzle piece doesn't fit anymore."
"There is no way out," Strange said, still staring out the window, looking quite brooding, himself, now. "Only a way further in." He glanced down at his left wrist, at the watch there.
She blinked, a chill itching down her back. "Right."
"And he trusted you to pull him through that—further in?"
She shrugged, adjusting as Max started to slump in deep sleep. "Guess so. Not sure why. I didn't really do anything."
He cocked his head and studied her. "Maybe that's why. Did that occur to you?"
She blinked. "That I've done nothing much for him—yeah, it occurs to me all the time," she snarked, taking another sip. "Used to love that song—'You can stand under my umber-ella-ella-ella-eh'." The sorcerer, so far, had a strange ability to stare straight past her armor and she felt the need to slip another layer on.
He smirked—a real one this time. "No, has it occurred to you that he trusted you because you had no ulterior motive?"
She hemmed, then hawed, then squinted one eye at him, pulling a guilty face. "Well, that's not entirely true either—I mean, I thought he was pretty hot."
A first for her—Strange laughed, a nice, warm husky chuckle. "I meant that you didn't expect anything he wasn't able to give."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Just how much do you know about him?"
He turned back to the window. "Since my…transformation…I've made it a responsibility of mine to know as much as I can about others like me. The Avengers, for instance. If something…unpleasant should happen and it's necessary for us all to work together, I need an understanding of my…coworkers, if you will." He gave her a wry look and turned back to the window.
Max cooed in his sleep and settled deeper into her lap.
"I've watched all the footage. Seen all there is to see, studied SHIELD and HYDRA and AIM."
She couldn't stop the bitterness from leaking out, a tiny spark of anger. "And so you wanted to come and see the World's Deadliest Assassin, hm?"
He turned fully to face her. "I came because Stark asked a favor, his voice shaking as he told me about the girl who'd come to be his daughter and how much pain she was in, watching her partner's life tip in the balance," he said, his voice gentle and low.
She flushed. "He said that?"
He nodded, slowly, not breaking eye contact. "It was heavily implied that you were…special. If you managed to heal a broken man in a year flat, you're more than special."
She looked away. "Brought him back from the dead like a fucking White Walker—and for what?"
Strange sighed. "It does seem that you have quite the connection."
She tipped back the last of her wine and set the glass on the side table. "Lot of good that's doing him now."
He shrugged. "It may be the only thing that's keeping him tethered to this plane, Darcy."
She stared at him—hard. "What?"
He gave her the same look right back. "You know what I do, right?"
She nodded. "You…" And she petered quickly out.
He smiled, not unkindly. "I protect our world from…threats. Of the otherworldly variety. I have a strong understanding of those other worlds and what it means to travel between, of what it means to feel the power of those realms in my hands." He showed her his scars again. "I can feel…things, connections, lines, energies, now, that I couldn't before, that I spent my life scoffing at. The bonds between people, their auras, everything that sounds like a load is based on some cosmic truth, Darcy. Your connection to him is…palpable. I felt it as soon as I walked in the room."
She couldn't look away from him. "That's why you were staring at me instead of Tony?"
His gaze softened. "I was staring at you because your aura was giving off the strangest wheel of colors and reading you was fascinating and I was determined to untangle your energies."
She blinked at him. Then blinked again.
His expression softened further. "You're this rainbow of reds and blues and purples and I…I wanted to help. To do what I can. That's why I…do what I do, now. I can still help people, just…as a different sort of doctor."
She stared into his expressive face. "What do the colors mean?"
He sighed. "You're angry. You're defensive, you're pulled so tightly into yourself you're in danger of collapsing into a deep well, Darcy. You're full of blue sadness and indigo mourning and everything in between." He huffed. "I know how this sounds…"
She nodded, a little dazed.
He ran his fingers roughly through his hair. "Just…try to use that. He's just barely out of reach."
She bit her bottom lip. "You said he's blocked?"
He sighed again. "He's got a dark energy surrounding him, he's locked somewhere in his head, Darcy. So you need to use that connection to try and dig him out."
She jerked. "Me?! Why me?!"
He gestured, casting about. "You're….you're his…"
Girl. He'd called her His Girl more than once, old-fashioned and sweet.
Wife.
Lover.
Best friend.
Confidant.
Teammate.
Partner in crime.
Human shield.
Cheerleader.
Partner—
"Mate," he finally landed on, surprising her. "Your bond is strong. People don't understand what they do when they take a vow, what sorts of energies they bring together, they don't understand just what it is they're doing, tying themselves to another soul, but…you. You understand. Use that connection."
She stared at him in shock. "I'm the one that dropped a building on him!" she explained, incredulous. "What good will I do?"
He took a deep breath and finally sat down in the chair beside hers and took up her hand, reaching across the distance and closing the loop. "I don't know what they did to you, Darcy. It would take me years to understand just how the various things you've been stuck with have altered you. Something like that is tailored specifically to a person's internal structures, but I know you can feel things now. Don't tell me you can't. I can see it in your face."
Shocked at this psychic reading, she tried to jerk her hand back, but he wouldn't let her. "What do you mean?"
A vaguely triumphant smile curled one corner of his mouth. He knew he had her. "You aren't just Darcy Lewis anymore, are you?"
She flinched, not just at his use of the name she was becoming more and more desperate to shed, but at his accusation.
"You're something else. You're something more. You have capabilities I'm sure you haven't even had a chance to stumble on yet, and you don't even know it. You brought him back. I looked at his readings, Darcy, and his files. Banner is right: he was dead, Darcy. He was dead for a full two minutes. That's long enough to lose someone to the darkness, that's long enough for brain damage and organ failure, but you brought him back. You pulled him from whatever pit he was sinking into. And you healed Max, so I'm told. Bucky responded to you when you spoke-twice."
A chill ran up her spine. "How do you know all this?"
He squeezed her hand, but ignored her question. "Use that, Darcy. He's just there, he's just out of reach. I can't reach his energies, but I can see them flagging. Use that tether and reel him back in."
((()))
She spent an inordinate amount of time that night staring up at the dark ceiling, Max sound asleep beside her, curled up against her shins under the covers.
Stephen Strange's words that afternoon still floated around in her head, making things murky and covering all her other thoughts in sludge.
He was right: she wasn't Darcy anymore. She was someone—something—else. It was time she accepted it. She'd wanted to belong to the team before, and in a heavier capacity than administrative support and marital connection, and now—ironically, of course—she did. She was definitely one of them now, and there was no way around it.
She'd feel better about it if she knew just what she was supposed to be doing. But she barely understood what she was capable of, and it wasn't like there was someone around to show her.
She had two serums swimming in her veins.
She was capable of healing herself—and others—in an enhanced fashion.
At strange, inappropriate moments, she had the same strength as an enhanced individual as well. Her reflexes were the same, only enhanced at incomprehensible intervals.
She huffed out a sigh. "I had to be a freak among freaks, huh?" she said to the ceiling, finally sitting up and throwing off the covers.
Max didn't budge.
Figuring she might as well let the rambunctious guy sleep, she slid on her leggings under her overlarge sleeping t-shirt and then one of Bucky's sweaters, a thin, blue-striped thing that was soft and well-worn and smelled like him. It drowned her. She let it comfort her for a short moment, but when her throat started to cramp, she huffed again and went on her way, out of the suite and down the stairs, determined to throw off her restlessness with movement.
And she found herself in the lab again, switching on a dim lamp that Bruce kept in the corner, and it warmed the room with soft, pale light. She went to perch in the chair beside the bed, but then found herself sliding onto the bed beside him, propping herself next to his right hip.
For a moment, there was an illusion that he would turn his head and open his eyes and look at her, the same way he always did, his blue gaze warm with affection.
But he was still, even as she reached down to brush a lock of hair away from his face. She'd tried reaching out to him again with her strange abilities so many times she'd lost count. Of course, she hadn't mentioned her failures to Tony or Bruce, knowing they'd skin her alive if they knew she was making attempts.
As yet, he was out of reach to her, at least along that avenue.
The yearning sharpened in her chest, an acute burn attempting to push out of her sternum. She reached down and took up his hand. "You're probably right, you know," she murmured to him. "A psychiatrist would say that our codependent relationship is unhealthy."
Nothing.
"But I'm functioning just fine, so I'd tell him to just suck it, probably." She smiled at her own brashness.
His right, human hand was limp, but his skin was warm against hers. "I miss you," she whispered. "I wish you'd come back. There are still a bunch of corny movies I have to show you, and you need to finish reading The Secret Garden to me. Remember? We only got halfway through. I wanna know what happens, you tease."
The heart monitor continued to beep softly. His pulse was steady against her palm. She traced his wedding band with her thumb, the etching she'd had engraved, and knew the engraving that went with it would still be fresh on the inside of the ring. 'Jamie'.
"I lied," she whispered, unable to force her voice out further as her stubborn throat continued to tighten. "I'm not functioning. I'm barely able to pull myself out of bed." She bit her lip and a tear leaked down her cheek. "I can't think of anything but the fact that I put you here." Her voice sounded breathy and weak to her own ears and she rolled her eyes at the damsel she'd become. "And I know that you'd tell me to shut up. But it's not something that I can just ignore, Jamie. One way or another, I put you here."
For a long moment, she sat there, holding his hand, gasping for breath as tears rolled silently down her cheeks, determined to get it under some semblance of control.
It took longer than she liked to admit.
"I've never needed anyone before," she finally murmured, staring down at his hand. "I learned, early, to rely on myself. Everyone else was a potential disappointment. So I shut myself in. I built walls around myself and I didn't even really know I was doing it. But you…" She smiled. "You're such a bastard, you just tunneled under instead. And now I…now I need you." She swallowed. "It's sort of awful, needing someone. I don't…I don't know what to do now." She sniffled. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do, Jamie."
He was still.
"Strange thinks I can…find you…wherever you are. Don't really…know what that means, but…" She also didn't know how it would be any different than what she'd already tried. She squeezed his hand and spent a long time staring into his face, the way the dim lamp cast its glow over his features, half of him thrown into romantic relief.
God, when she was young, she'd stared at his picture in her class history book, his high cheekbones and tough jaw, the laughter in his eyes. Her friend, Emma, had gone on and on about Captain America and how much he looked like her Ken Doll—come to think of it, Darcy wondered if he'd been the basis for the design. She'd always wondered, then, if she'd been trying to lay some claim in the way young girls do, which was ironic now, considering she was best friends with the guy.
But she'd always quietly admired the other one, the friend, thrown into shadow by Steven Roger's suddenly two-for-the-price-of-one outline.
Bucky Barnes, clever name, unofficial leader of the Howling Commandos, Sergeant of the 107th Ground Troop. The only member to give his life.
She'd thought it was so romantic and brave, noble and valiant.
Creepy, now, looking back. She'd married him, after all. It was like history had been whispering in her ear and looking at him sometimes gave her a strange, unquantifiable sense of déjà vu. He'd been plucked out of 1945 and deposited here, in front of her.
Except, he hadn't. He'd suffered through decades of torture and torment, doing the dirty work of the Cold War villains she'd read about in high school, things that had made her blood run cold, things he still didn't talk much about, even to her. He'd been the one to get his hands bloody while they sat behind their desks and plotted with their fingers steepled, pushing the pieces around on their chessboards.
He hadn't been the knight, though; he'd been the pawn, so easily moved around, fighting battles at everyone else's behest.
To a certain degree, as much as she hated it and disagreed with it on a moral level, on a fundamental level, he was still right: he hadn't been in control of his actions. But he'd still been the one to carry his orders out.
Nothing could change that and nothing could erase it. What was done was done.
Was he back in torture now, she wondered, trapped in his own head with all those ghosts?
Could she break him out?
She let go of his warm hand with a heavy sigh and adjusted her position so that she could settle her palm over his sternum. Then she spent a moment fishing around for that nameless something that had taken up residence deep inside her, a little cushy pocket of power that nestled there, somewhere behind her heart. "Jamie?" she whispered, leaning low over him and looking into his handsome face. "I don't have a cute, foreign pet name for you, baby. But you gotta come back to me. It's cold out here without you."
There was no other word for it: her heart gave a shuddering shiver.
But nothing else happened.
She shut her eyes and focused, tugging at that loose thread again, finding it easily this time, right there, right where she needed it, and coaxing it loose.
But nothing happened.
She sighed, fairly certain that it was physically, scientifically possible to feel your heart breaking, and cursing that it could take this long, be this drawn out. A bit of torture in itself, as she half-laid there, staring into his unresponsive face.
"You can't leave me like this," she murmured. "A month isn't long enough." She was pretty sure that no amount of time with him would be long enough, but that was neither here nor there.
She fell asleep, curled up beside him, her head on his chest.
((()))
"Pep, I literally just walked out the door five minutes ago—what, you can't go a few seconds without telling your husband how much you adore him?" Tony snarked into his Starkphone as he waited for JARVIS to drop him off on the lab floor.
Pepper sighed into the phone. "Tony." But her annoyed tone was laced with amusement.
He smiled. "Whatcha need, Miss Potts—more of your man? I can come back up, don't wanna be accused of employee maltreatment."
She snorted. "Uh, doesn't the fact that I'm the CEO of Stark Industries make you my employee, Mister Stark?"
He chuckled. "Ah, see, an easy mistake. The fact that it's my company nullifies your argument," he fired back. "We're getting lunch, right? Noon?" He pointed. "I'll swing by for you."
"Oh, Tony, we can meet there—"
"Ah, no. None of that," he interrupted. "If I agree to that you'll lose yourself in some conference call with some suit with his head up his ass and I'll never see you again. I'm pickin' you up, Potts, and we're going down to—" He ground to a halt, both his feet and his words.
A short pause.
"Tony?" Pepper questioned.
There was a sudden squeezing sensation in his chest in the general vicinity of his heart as he stared through the glass. "Oh, shit," he murmured.
"What?" Pepper asked, sounding slightly alarmed.
He sighed. "The kid's in the lab."
Another short pause. "It's a little early, but it's understandable," she said, her voice softening with sympathy. "I mean, he is her—"
"No," he cut her off. "I mean, she's asleep in here. The lamp's on, looks she was here late."
A long pause. Then—"Oh, Tony."
He sighed again, unsure what to do. "Do I go in? Do I stay out here and wait for her to wake up? What do I do, here? I'll wake her up if I go in and start working…"
"Tony," Pepper coached, shifting tasks. "Go in. Wake her up as gently as you can. But send her home."
He tugged a hand down his face, exhausted. This whole ordeal was totally sapping him of sleep. "I can't."
Her voice sharpened a little. "Tony Stark—"
"No, I mean, I can try, but she won't go. You know how she is. She's stubborn. No wonder we get along so well. She either won't leave his side or she'll insist on working to distract herself. She hates just sitting in that apartment—"
Her voice sharpened further at the idea that he hadn't offered to have her stay with them. "Why didn't you—"
"I did!" he rejoined, jumping on the defensive. "Of course I offered our spare room! She's ignored the offer. God, Pep, you think I'm a monster?"
His wife took a deep breath over the phone. "No, Tony. I think you're a good man who's a little lost in the dark. Sometimes tough love is necessary. You know that better than anyone."
He sighed, leaning his forehead on the glass. "I don't know what to do for her, Pep."
"You don't have to do much of anything," she murmured. "Just go and be there for her. She needs you right now."
They hung up and he slowly edged his way into the lab, walking softly in his Nikes, determined not to wake her yet.
Bucky hadn't moved, like he'd been remade in stone.
And Darcy had curled up beside him, on the small patch of bed that was clear, her head on a folded arm, her other hand resting on Bucky's waist.
Bracing himself, he reached out and set a hand on her shoulder. "Darce?"
She was out, and out hard, for she didn't stir.
He wrapped his hand around her shoulder and squeezed. "Short Stack."
Nothing.
Frowning, he shook her gently, but she was boneless beneath his hand. "Darcy. Darcy." Alarm spiking a sharp trail up his spine, he used both hands, leaning low over her and turning her over.
She had all her color.
"Darcy!" He pulled her off the bed and into his arms, letting her legs trail on the floor as he cradled her in his arms. "DARCY!" he shouted, pressing his fingers to her throat.
A pulse throbbed there, good and strong.
But she wouldn't wake.
"Darcy, don't you play games with me, baby girl!" he ordered. But she'd never been the sort to play a game like this, so he slammed his palm into the flashing button on the wall beside the bed.
Paging Doctor Banner, JARVIS said. Stand by.
"Darcy. Darcy, Darcy…" he kept repeating, like a mantra, his heart thundering in his chest as he held her close, pressing his fingers again and again to her pulse, determined not to lose it.
All vital signs normal, Sir, JARVIS added.
Bruce skidded into the lab just then, his glasses askew, his hair sleep-tousled, still in his ratty t-shirt and pajama bottoms. "What's going on?"
"There's something in the goddamn water, Bruce," Tony snapped, clutching Darcy close.
Bruce frowned, straightened his glasses and crossed the room. "She's displaying the same symptoms?"
All vital signs are normal, Doctor, JARVIS said again.
"All he told me was that we had someone unresponsive, he didn't say it was Darcy. She's doing the same thing?" He pressed his fingers to her throat as well, then nodded. "Pulse is normal. She's breathing regularly."
Steve appeared in the doorway, face drawn. "What's going on? The Admin Team Alert went off in our room."
Tony could've cursed that bloody alert system right then, the decision they'd come to that only Team Lead rooms would be notified of any potential emergency. And Steve was one of those Team Leads.
"It's Darcy."
Steve's face paled. "What's wrong with her?"
"She won't wake up," Bruce said, his voice low as he slid a hand under Darcy's t-shirt. "No fever, nothing's ruptured," he continued, feeling around. "Steve, could you—?"
"Already on it." He darted into the adjoining room, and after a moment, a metallic dragging sound interrupted the eerie stillness as he pulled a second bed into the rather cavernous, echoing room.
Tony laid her on it and Bruce went to work, hooking things up, taking readings, but soon…
He shrugged. "I'm…I'm lost. I don't get it."
They all stood around, staring down at her.
