A/N: I did warn this was a weird story, right? I sincerely hope no one is too OOC.

Chapter titles are inspired by Broadway shows, by the way.

Enjoy!

Well, Isn't This Fantastick

Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.

This cannot be happening. Why is this happening! It isn't right. It's not fair. And yet, it is going forth like it's no big deal. Like so many lives won't be destroyed when it's all over. And she'll be standing in the middle of it when the dust finally clears, and she will have nothing left. No leg to stand on. No shoulder to cry on.

Darcy is distracted from her internal breakdown by a car's blaring horn. She startles, stepping back immediately onto the pavement behind her. Looking up as the driver of a snazzy BMW flips her off—she smiles sickly sweet at him and blows him a kiss—she sees the red hand on the crossing signal flashing at her. She needs to remember not to freak out when she's walking home. It could get her killed someday.

For what feels like an eternity in hell—the temperature has hit 103 and she is stuck in her heels and navy blue, tight skirt—Darcy waits for the multitude of cars to stop racing over the crosswalk. She has no time to laze about the streets of DC. She needs to get home; she needs to get home to him. When the traffic does finally clear enough for her to sprint as fast as she can in her three inch death shoes, she speedily walks through the busy DC streets, rounding the final corner just as she begins to see stars swirling in front of her. She blinks away the dizziness and rushes to her building.

This is not a drill. She needs to find Bucky immediately.

Darcy enters the building and goes to the single elevator just as its doors are closing. She reaches out, a 'wait' on the tip of her tongue, when the doors shut.

"Fuck!" she exclaims, jamming the toe of her shoe against the sliding doors.

The stairs! She always forgets about the stairs. Darcy moves down the lobby to the door behind which hides the darkened, spooky staircase Darcy is certain has been used for drug transactions and murders. Holding her breath—the smell only spurs on her conspiracies about this staircase—Darcy clicks and clacks up to the eleventh floor, thankful not to have stumbled upon the scene of any criminal activity.

"Bucky!" Darcy calls as she unlocks and opens her apartment door.

The place is spotless. She spent the first night the Winter Soldier shared her apartment cleaning the whole thing. Bucky may have managed to sleep that night, but she kept running over in her mind the bits of his report she had read all of those years ago. Violent. Ruthless. Heartless. Three adjectives nobody wants describing the man with a metal arm snoozing on their sofa.

That was two nights ago. She accidentally fell asleep in the pile of clothes she had stored in the spare closet. When she woke up several hours later in her own bed, she realised there was a part of her that had expected to never wake up again. A side effect of granting HYDRA's favourite play thing a safe house, she assumes.

Darcy took the next two days off for two reasons. One: she was exhausted and had a few vacation days stacked up she needed to use before they expired at the end of the year. Two: there was no way she could risk leaving the Winter Soldier alone in her apartment. No work would have gotten done. So, she remained at home.

For the most part, the ex-SHIELD acquaintance and the ex-HYDRA assassin sat on the sofa in relative silence. What was there to talk about, anyway? He was clearly worn out from, well, being on the run from basically every powerful secret agency in the world, and she was at a loss for words.

One thing came out of her days off, though. He told her to call him Bucky.

She is on nickname-basis with a murderer.

Ahem, former murderer. It helps Darcy's nerves regarding the whole hiding-a-man-on-the-run situation to make that distinction.

"Bucky? It would really help me out if you showed yourself!"

Darcy moves around the apartment, panic swarming inside of her. She bangs on the bathroom door and calls his name one more time. There is no response.

Panic turns to terror. Darcy has lost the Winter Soldier. He is not in her bedroom. Not in the bathroom. Not in the spare closet. Unless he has managed to contort his muscular body into a shape fit for the kitchen cupboards, he's run off.

Maybe he knows. Maybe he bugged her phone or her brain and he knows.

Darcy stands in the middle of her lounge and runs a hand through her hair. It flops over her face, but she does nothing to move it out of the way. Everything is clean. There are absolutely no clues as to where he has gone. Which, she supposes, is the point of running off while your awesome pal Darcy is at work. She has to remember that he is on the lamb. She did warn him that being in DC was a bad idea. Perhaps he took her words to heart.

Good riddance. Darcy doesn't know anybody that would find much enjoyment out of sheltering someone like the Winter Soldier, no matter how sure you are he's a changed man.

Moving her hair out of her eyes, Darcy flops on the sofa and reaches for the TV remote. She is just about to turn it on when someone knocks on her door.

Darcy freezes. Everything inside of her stills except for her thoughts. Her mind goes haywire. It could be SHIELD. Or worse, HYDRA.

Careful, Darcy, she tells herself. The knock comes again.

Getting to her feet, the young reporter grips the remote tight in her hand and approaches the door slowly.

"Darcy Lewis, I know you're in there!"

Darcy could collapse from relief. The remote clatters to the floor. "Meg, what do you want? I thought you were going on a date tonight," Darcy says, opening the door for her across-the-hall neighbour. She is one of the nosy ones Darcy told Bucky about.

Blond hair shimmering as the sun sets behind them, Meg's smile widens when she looks down at Darcy. "I was going to invite you up to the roof! My date cancelled."

"The roof?" Darcy frowns. "We're not allowed on the roof."

"I thought so too, but I saw some guy go up there a little while ago and I thought maybe they'd changed the rules."

Blood drains from Darcy's face. "Some guy?" She reaches out for Meg's arms and forces the taller woman to look her in the eyes. "Meg, what did this guy look like?"

"Oh no," she pouts, "was he some bad guy I was supposed to be on the lookout for?"

The straight answer to that question is a resounding yes, but Darcy can't say that. "No, no. I just need you to tell me what he looked like. Tall? Dark hair just about to reach his shoulders? Was he wearing a red jacket?"

"Yes to all three. Are you sure he's not a bad guy?"

Darcy is not prepared to respond to that question. She isn't entirely sure herself. Letting go of Meg, she retreats back into her apartment. "You know, he's just the new handyman for the building. He was supposed to come fix my sink, but he never showed."

"Maybe we could go up to the roof and demand he help you!" Meg suggests.

Darcy starts closing the door. Meg peers 'round the door's edge. "No, no. We'll leave him be. I'll call the landlord and leave a very strongly worded message. Sorry, Meg. I still think going up to the roof is against the building's safety regulations. Maybe we can hang out later. Right now I need to find something."

"Okay, Darcy! Have a nice evening," Meg says as the door closes.

Darcy leans against the door once it's closed, her head leaned back. She stares at her ceiling. Adrenaline has already started to spike her bloodstream. "You too, Meg. Sorry your date cancelled."

"It's okay! He's a jerk anyway." Meg's voice comes from far away, and soon Darcy hears the door to her friend's apartment open and shut.

The roof. She needs to get to the roof. It's true—they aren't allowed up there. Clearly, she forgot to mention that to Bucky when she went through the house rules his first night in her apartment. Although, to be fair, she would have expected him to know that going up to a roof where literally anybody could find him is a bad, bad, horrible idea.

Darcy pushes herself off of the door, grabs her keys, and exits her place. The steps to the roof are even creepier than the ones to her floor, but she swallows her fear and rushes as fast as she can in her damn high heels to the door that leads out to the badly maintained rooftop.

He lurches away from the roof's edge as soon as she bursts through the metal door. He is immediately on the defensive. Good. He should be afraid of her.

They are only five feet away from each other. Scraps of old cardboard boxes and broken tree limbs stand in their way. Darcy can practically smell the apprehension rolling off of Bucky. It seeps through his skin like sweat and wafts over to her. His hair covers his face like a curtain, but his eyes peak manage to through. They're squinted in the evening sun of September.

"Are you kidding me?" she says. Bucky flinches. "Are you? Well?"

It seems the former HYDRA killing machine is at a loss for words. He stares at Darcy, completely motionless. He would be good in a game of musical statues.

"I couldn't find you. You didn't leave any kind of note. Any clue as to where you might have gone! Which is fine if you had decided to completely skip town and run to some remote location nobody knows about, but you came up to the rooftop of my building? Bad move, Bucky. What were you thinking?" God, she sounds like a parent who's just caught their underage child sneaking in past their bedtime. "You weren't thinking, were you? That much is evident."

"I'm sorry," he says.

Darcy could laugh. She steps forward. The hardness of his eyes nearly throws her backwards, but she presses on. "Sorry won't cut it."

"Why not?" he grits. "I needed somewhere to clear my head."

"The shower always works for me!"

"Why can't I be up here? I am no idiot, Darcy Lewis. I know how to avoid detection."

This time, Darcy does laugh. The noise seems to spook him. "Apparently all of that time in HYDRA's freezer has sucked that ability right up. My neighbour saw you coming up here. She wanted to join you."

"No civilian knows who I am," he counters fiercely.

"I'm a civilian. My short time at SHIELD didn't change that. You can't assume anything about the people in this city." Darcy drops her head. The panic that followed her home is creeping upon her again.

A heavy silence wraps around the bickering pair, interrupted only by a barrage of police cars swerving through the streets. Bucky's knees bend in response to the noise.

"What's happ"—

—"Someone knows you're here. Someone other than me," she says.

"What?" Bucky careens forwards. Darcy instinctively moves in front of him, holding her hands out to stop him from falling. His hard chest expands with shallow breaths. "Who is it? How do they know?"

Darcy slides her hands to his forearms and shrugs helplessly. "I have no clue, but someone called the Post and said there had been a sighting of this guy known as the Winter Soldier." She looks up into his eyes. They are staring far beyond Darcy. "My boss . . . he wants me to write an exposé."

"You?" he asks, wide eyes flicking to hers. "But you write about politics."

Holding his eyes, Darcy sucks in a deep breath. "Somehow my boss figured out I was once involved with SHIELD. He says I have to write this piece revealing the Winter Soldier to the world. I said that I had no idea what he was talking about, but he has evidence of my time there." Now comes the really hard part. Darcy squeezes Bucky's real arm. His bewildered, frightened look slices into her soul. "He's threatening me."

"If you don't do it, he'll tell people you worked for SHIELD? People don't even know what SHIELD is. Nobody will be inclined to believe him," Bucky says.

Shaking her head, Darcy takes in another breath. "No, no, it's got nothing to do with SHIELD."

"Darcy," he says lowly. It's the first time in the three days they've known each other that he's called her by her name. A flutter runs through her belly. "You don't need to be afraid of me. I swear, I won't hurt you."

"I'm not scared of you hurting me," she says. The statement is half-true. She still has no idea what it is that makes him become the Winter Soldier. Anything could set him off.

"Then tell me what they have on you."

Darcy looks beyond Bucky to the sky. The moon is peaking through the clouds, preparing to take the sun's place. "I was rather . . . promiscuous at college. I was the nerdy girl all of the jocks wanted to get with. One of the guys thought it would be hilarious to make a sex tape without my knowledge to show all of his friends. I found out the next morning and forced them all to delete it. I thought it was gone, but my boss today—Bucky, he handed me a disc."

"And if you don't write the story, he'll release it."

"You sound much less angry than I thought you would be," she admits. They lock eyes again. His hair has been blown out of his face by a slight breeze. His forehead is creased, but he looks more concerned than pissed off. "Someone knows you're here. That's so beyond dangerous. You should leave right now and go somewhere safe."

"Or," he says, "I could stay here and help you write this exposé."

Darcy drops her hands and shakes her head. "No. That's out of the question. I can't write that story."

"Why not? They've got leverage."

"And I'm a big girl. When you leave SHIELD, they kind of swear you to secrecy. I release a full story on the Winter Soldier and I am sure I'll be killed the moment it hits the presses."

Bucky slips his hands through his hair. Darcy's hormonal mind can't help but equate him in that moment to a male supermodel, even with the mechanical arm.

"Not if I protect you," he says.

"From SHIELD or HYDRA? They'd both come after me."

"Both," he says. "Anyone."

Darcy would be stupid to ignore the sincerity in his voice. Why would he protect her, though? Payment for her taking him in, perhaps? Most likely. He was, after all, a product of the early 20th century. Super villain or not, he still knows how to treat a lady.

But he is asking her to put them both in serious danger. She thought she left this kind of life behind when she said goodbye to Jane.

"This is crazy," Darcy blurts. Watching Bucky's earnest eyes weave about her face brings a question to her mind. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why write this story? What do you get out of it besides a mob?"

Bucky's eyebrows move above the bridge of his nose. He looks pained. "If I give you the information you need for this article—Darcy"—and there is her name again—"I'm trying to find out who I was before I became HYDRA's secret weapon. Maybe by telling you my life's story, by . . . telling you everything I can remember, I can finally separate myself from the Winter Soldier."

This is madness. Shakespeare could write plays about this fucked up mess she has found herself in.

"You're sure?" she asks. "Because I am so not sure."

"It'll be hard and definitely dangerous, but I'm sure," he insists, and the openness of his eyes forces Darcy to believe him.

She nods slowly. "Okay. I guess we're going to do this. Now let's get back to the apartment before helicopters start circling."

Head swimming, Darcy leads Bucky to the staircase.