Chapter 15
“Long time no see, Bucky.”
Darcy wasn’t scared because, oddly, being cornered by this dude was becoming passé. Although the hold he had on her arm kind of smarted.
He seemed to realize that he was hurting her, immediately loosening his grip at her first squirm. Stepping back, he shook his head, clenching his metal fist with a subtle grinding noise and shaking his arms out. The cheap, thin button down shirt he was wearing was doing its best, but the seams were fit to burst. Not to mention how the pale yellow of the shirt totally clashed with the military cargo pants and his shit kicker boots.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said once there was a couple of feet between them.
Definitely enough room for her to get a shot off with her taser.
Her fingers twitched on her purse at the thought of her trusty weapon, and Bucky did a whole body flinch at the movement. For someone that had taken on a whole group of SHIELD agents with ease, it wasn’t the right reaction.
Making a show of pulling her bag off and carefully laying it on the ground, she held out her arms, palms up, Jesus style. He was stock still throughout the whole process, but kept his eyes glued to her every move.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said.
She didn’t expect him to laugh, a soft and rusty thing. From the wide set of his eyes, she didn’t think Bucky expected it, either.
“If anyone’s going to make that promise, I think it should be me,” he said finally, voice hoarse.
“While I don’t doubt your physical prowess,” Darcy put her hands down and tried to casually lean against the wall, immediately regretting her attempts to look nonchalant because they were in an alley and alleys were grimy and gross, “I was definitely the one doing the hurting the other two times we met, dude.”
Bucky took a step towards her, frowning. “Two times? I don’t…” he stopped mid-sentence, that mechanical whir from his arm getting louder again.
“Yeah, two times, remember? Once in New Mexico, and then at Culver University, I stopped you from killing Betty Ross,” she said, monitoring just how close he was getting. The reminder of their prior encounters had her on guard, but the image of him sobbing on his knees in the destroyed lab kept over riding any of her unease.
He’d been so broken.
“I don’t remember, I don’t…” he pulled at his hair, swaying hard, “There was snow…,” he looked up fiercely, “There was snow, and you gave me my name.”
He grabbed her hand, carefully this time, gently.
“Please, you gave me my name, I need more than my name, please help me, Oh God, please…” he begged, hugging her hand to his heaving chest.
Jane was going to kill her.
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The giant cheeseburger was calling her name. Grass-fed American beef, melted cheddar, crisp lettuce, ripe tomatoes, salty pickles, all on a brioche bun…
Her stomach was growling at the smell alone.
If Darcy wasn’t back in five minutes, Jane was eating without her, friendship be damned.
She had just been running to the Walgreens down the street for toothbrushes and toothpaste; she should have been back before the room service was delivered, but Darcy had a long history of being distracted by the ‘As Seen on TV’ section with all of the infomerical junk. Jane avoided looking at the wedge cut fries, all golden and covered in cracked pepper.
This was torture.
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Today, 5:44 PM
janie-pants. light of my life. my sister from another mister. my favorite human besides ina garten and that’s only because of my life goal of getting drunk with the barefoot contessa. something came up, and i won’t be back to the hotel tonight. but i’m fine! i’m being a good samaritan, and you shouldn’t be worried. i have to turn my phone off bc of reasons, but i’ll call you tomorrow. oh, and fluffernutter. that’s the safe word for i am a-ok, right? i’m 99% sure it’s that one. so, i repeat, fluffernutter.
Message Delivered
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Darcy shut off her phone after hitting send, as per her compromise with Bucky, and handed it to him as they walked down the street.
After agreeing to help him, she’d persuaded him that the first step was getting him clothes that didn’t scream ‘terrorist’. He’d capitulated only on the caveat that she used cash because cards could be traced. Same reasoning went into having to turn her phone off and scrambling it or whatever he was now doing to it.
She hadn’t asked who would be doing the tracing.
There weren’t a lot of people out, too late for the work crowd and too early for going out, but there was enough foot traffic that they were drawing looks. They were in a nicer area with a lot of cute restaurants that were not helping Darcy ignore the fact that she hadn’t eaten since sushi on the jet, and the man at her side was not blending in his mismatched outfit and dirty Fabio hair. Bucky tensed at every wayward glance, eyes constantly shifting between different passerby.
By the time they arrived at the bank, he had his metal fist clenched at the small of her back, an ironic gesture given how Darcy felt like she was the one doing the leading in their little duo.
“Ok,” she said, parking him at a bench outside with decent lines of sight into the building, “I’m going to go grab some cash. I’ll be right back, just stay put.”
“Good thinking, HYDRA’s facial recognition programs would pick me up on the bank cameras,” he intoned calmly, as if commenting on the chill in the air.
Darcy, however, was non-plussed.
“HYDRA?”
“Yes?” he questioned, “Who else would I be talking about?” Bucky crooked his head, frowning. It was the first emotion she’d seen on his face that wasn’t heartbreaking.
“I’m going to get cash,” Darcy glared, “On second thought, I am going to get a lot of cash because something tells me we’ll need it, but when I get back, we are having a discussion about pertinent information. Starting with those HYDRA fuckers.”
She had a finger waving in his face by the end of tirade, reminding her of old Sister Ernestine who had been her terrifying second grade teacher, but she couldn’t stop it.
Bucky went cross eyed staring at her finger before he looked past it to her. His limp hair was still hanging in his face, but it didn’t shade the small grin that broke across his mouth.
“You got it, doll,” he easily agreed, leaning back and stretching his flesh arm across the top of the bench.
“Good,” Darcy replied, thrown off. She nodded at nothing like an idiot, before shuffling away, one eye on him until she went through the door.
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Jane had been so engrossed in devouring her meal that she hadn’t heard her phone go off.
It was only twenty minutes of wallowing on the couch later, weighed down by her food coma, that it dawned on her how late Darcy was in coming back. She rolled herself off the couch to go check her phone where it was charging by the bed, cursing her greasy fingers for the film they left on the screen.
After reading the message Darcy had sent, Jane started cursing her friend instead.
“Not worry, my ass,” she muttered to herself as she called Thor.
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“So you were a brainwashed assassin for HYDRA?” Darcy asked as she straightened a blue cap she’d gotten at a convenience store on his head, tucking some of his hair behind his ear. Bucky stubbornly pulled the hair back into his face, scrunching his nose at her fussing.
“What the hell is brainwashed?” he asked, batting her hand away. Softly, of course.
She exaggerated scrunching her whole face back at him, blowing a raspberry, “Brainwashed, you know, methodically changing someone’s mind or memories through way unpleasant means. How do you not know that word?”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “I don’t remember a lot of things,” he pointed out.
She turned to call a cab, intent on getting to a department store before they closed, but kept talking over her shoulder. “You don’t remember things about yourself, sure, but you still have a decent vocabulary. And you know how to do stuff, obviously, like how to make my phone untraceable without destroying it.”
Quietly considering that, he watched her yell at a vacant cab that passed them up. As she flipped it the bird, he cautiously agreed, “I guess.”
“I know,” Darcy said, confidently throwing her hand out again to hail another taxi, “Brainwash is a common enough word, though. Unless you were around before the Korean War which, for your information, was when it was coined. Post-World War II American History 307 coming in clutch.”
A cab finally took pity on them and moved to pull over.
“What Korean War?” Bucky asked, puzzled.
The car stopped in front of them, and he reached to open the door for her with his left hand. Staring at the metal fist, a feat of science that should have been impossible, a prosthetic with such strength and articulation, Darcy suddenly realized that she probably shouldn’t be ruling anything out.
“Just what are the chances that you’re older than sixty, Buckaroo?” she asked as she climbed in.
“With the serum? Pretty good,” he said with a shrug.
She hit her head on the roof in surprise.
“Serum?” she grumbled, rubbing the sore spot through her hair, “What did I say about pertinent information?”
He settled in, closing the door. “That I should share it.”
Giving him an incredulous look, she made quick work of sliding open the partition to tell the driver where to go, making sure to close it firmly so the cabbie wouldn’t overhear them before asking in a low voice, “Then why didn’t you do that?”
“I just did,” he whispered back guilelessly, but Darcy thought she saw amusement behind his eyes.
Maybe he couldn’t remember who he was, but she would bet her grandmother’s rosary that Bucky had been a little shit.
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“Look, it’s not a great sign that she withdrew twenty grand in cash,” Clint sighed. Jane raised to the balls of her feet, and he shuddered with the memory of the last time he’d faced her anger in New Mexico.
Except this time, he was in a sweet hotel suite instead of a cold desert, and he had Thor to step between them.
“If Darcy did such a thing, then it was for good reason. This I can assure you,” the Asgardian said, winding an arm behind him to keep his girlfriend where she was. Clint could still hear her spluttering obscenities.
“There’s no if about it,” he pulled up the footage from the bank and a copy of the transaction forms on the Tony’s tablet. Iron Man was busy coordinating with Pepper on how to handle the fallout of SHIELD’s collapse, Nat was taking one for the team in the Senate, Steve was still sleeping off his five hundred foot drop into the water, and Bruce was being a lazy turd. Not really, but Clint was pretty jealous that Banner got to stay cozy in the Tower while all of this crazy was happening here. “I believe that you think Darcy is good, but forgive me if I’m not so much with the trust right now. My entire life kind of got exposed as one huge fraud, so you’ll have to excuse my reservations about a woman dropping off the face of the Earth with a ton of money.”
At that, not even Thor with all of his godly power could hold back the tiny titan that was Jane. “Just what are you implying? That my best friend in the whole world is HYDRA? Because if that’s what you think, I can tell you where to shove it,” which was when Thor put a hand over her mouth.
“There is no reason to suspect anything foul of Darcy,” Thor warned, voice angry even as he struggled to contain Dr. Foster.
“That’s not true, and you both know it,” he stared them both down, waiting for Thor to release Jane, “There’s something off about Darcy, and you two are in on it. I’m not an idiot. I may be hard of hearing, but it’d be really difficult for me to have missed all the secret conversations and looks between the three of you. If I weren’t a, you know, freaking world class spy, maybe I’d chalk it up to some menage a trois deal, but again, I’m not an idiot.”
Thor didn’t blink, but Jane, for all of her intimidating rage, wasn’t so stoic. She sucked on her bottom lip and started tapping her fingers against her leg, left eyelid twitching from where she was fighting to maintain eye contact with him.
Pitiful.
“So are you guys going to enlighten me, or what?”
Both of them stayed silent; although Jane looked close to apoplexy.
“Ugh,” Clint tilted his head back and grunted at the ceiling, “I don’t actually think Darcy is HYDRA, okay? I like Darcy. And since it’s not exactly classified anymore, I can kind of prove it by saying that I was sent to evaluate her for SHIELD’s gifted people Index, but I definitely did not put her on there. Even though I am pretty sure she should be. You can trust me. I need to know whatever it is you guys aren’t saying so I can go find her.”
Jane let out the breath she’d been holding in a rush, looking up at Thor. For his part, Thor seemed just as unsure, quirking his mouth and lifting a shoulder questioningly. The good doctor turned back to him, and bit her lip. She didn’t look great, not that Clint would ever say that out loud, but her skin was wan and there were huge circles under her eyes.
She’d looked less rattled after being kidnapped, and Clint suddenly remembered Jane promising to take care of Darcy when he dropped her off the night Darce’s mom died.
“Ok,” she caved, sounding defeated and small, “Ok. The thing is…”
But she was interrupted by a ding from the forgotten tablet on the hotel table, an alert for the facial recognition program Clint had been running on Darcy.
“We’ve got a hit!” he said, choosing the immediate lead over whatever Jane had been about to divulge. There’d be time for secrets later. “Looks like it’s only an hour or so old, too.”
Of course, seeing the Winter Soldier buying socks with Darcy in a Nordstrom across town made him forget all about whatever they were hiding.
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Bucky came out of the bathroom dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, hair damp from his shower and looking so much less like a haggard hobo now that he was clean. She was resolutely not looking at what those pants were doing for his thighs because she wasn’t a lust ruled teenager.
As he bent to pick up a sandwich from the room service cart, Darcy maybe had to flop back against the loveseat and throw her arm over her eyes, feigning exhaustion.
“You may have been right about this place. Shower was nice,” Bucky admitted through a mouth full of pastrami.
She cracked one eye open to see him smile at her, cheeks puffed out with food like a perfectly content chipmunk. He’d wanted to go the low rent motel route, but she’d won the argument in the end. Motels had thin walls, and if he wanted her help, what she did wasn’t exactly quiet. Maybe a penthouse suite at the Jefferson was a bit much, but she was tired, cranky, and knew that the hotel would keep her off the books with a big enough tip.
“If I’d known that a decent shower and food was the way to get on your good side, I’d have gone with that back in the lab instead of screaming.”
Bucky looked troubled as he gulped down the last bite, reaching for another sandwich as he asked, “How does that work, exactly? I’m still pretty fuzzy on what went down then.”
“Are you?” she stalled, “You seem way more with it now. With the grinning and being a general mook, and all.”
“Mook!” he laughed, triumphant, “I know that one! And yeah, I’m still fuzzy on memories, but everything isn’t so confusin’ now. It’s like the longer I’m awake, the more things kinda make sense.”
His words were getting a little rougher, clipping his g’s and hitting the r’s hard, but Darcy didn’t mention the accent. She figured it was best to just let it all develop naturally, anything was better than the pained monotone he’d started with today.
“Maybe they were giving you something to keep you docile or whatever?” she guessed.
“They were always givin’ me something, Darcy,” he rolled his eyes, chomping another huge bite of food. “Don’t think I don’t realize what you’re doin’, by the way, avoiding my question.”
“I said I’d help you,” she said with little guilt, “That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable giving you my life story.”
“Fair enough,” he said, licking some mustard from his thumb and sitting on the couch across from her, “But it does make your little pertinent information speech seem a bit hypocritical, don’t ya think?”
Darcy stared back cooly. “No, it really doesn’t. This isn’t pertinent. It has nothing to do with you and who you are.” She leaned forward, braced her arms on her knees, an obvious challenge.
Bucky mirrored her position, meeting her gaze with a slight tilt to corner of his lips.
“Understood, doll. Understood.”
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“I don’t know what the Winter Soldier is! All I know is that the guy on the film is the one who attacked my lab! And now he has Darcy!” Jane screeched.
Clint had run to the Nordstrom with Thor, fully planning on grabbing Darcy and letting Thor do battle with the super assassin. Even Nat couldn’t take the Winter Soldier, and he was of the opinion that anything Nat couldn’t do, he definitely couldn’t do. Darcy, however, had been long gone. Unsurprising with who she had backing her up. Clint’d texted Nat about the sighting, but hadn’t heard back from her.
“We both know that Darcy would not be taken against her will,” Thor reasoned.
“I get that you’re supportive of your friend and all, buddy,” Clint argued, “But it’s not like she could have said no to an assassin.” He faced Jane, “ And how would you know that the Winter Soldier was the one who attacked your lab? You were supposedly at Walmart.”
Jane gulped, but was saved by a furious knocking on the hotel door, nearly taking the thing of its hinges. Thor called Mjolnir from the coffee table, and Clint fingered a knife sheathed under his shirt and went for the door.
He was not expecting to see Steve through the peep hole.
Cap slipped through as soon as the door cracked open, looking around wildly.
“You found Bucky?” he asked desperately. Clint made note of the hospital wrist band he was still wearing, and decided to ignore the fact that he was dressed in scrubs that were three sizes too small.
“Bucky?” Clint asked blankly, “And aren’t you supposed to be sleeping off being drowned?”
Having finished perusing the room and apparently not finding what he wanted, Steve turned back to him.
“Nat said you’d found Bucky. Where is he?” His eyes latched onto the video of Darcy and the Winter Soldier shopping that was still pulled up on the tablet. “There! Where was this? We need to go get him!”
“Captain, do you know this villain?” Thor queried while Jane stood there gaping at a deranged Captain America.
Steve scowled at Thor. “He’s not a villain! He’s my friend, and he needs my help! I need to find him!”
Clint felt a stress headache coming on. Feverishly wishing this god awful day would be over with already, he suggested “Maybe we should start from the beginning.”
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Things were not going well.
Darcy had gotten them to MSS with little problem, she was long past finding that difficult or holding them there being draining, but bringing up the vision of that snowy mountain was proving to be difficult. It’d been so easy before, to just pluck it from where she could feel it burning on the edge of her awareness.
The problem was that, where before there had only been one pinprick of ice in the already chilly realm, now there were dozens. She’d called the first one she felt when they’d materialized there, while Bucky breathed a little harder, but still holding it together pretty well.
Then a window opened, and instead of a white mountain, there was a darkened living room with an older man sitting by a roaring fire, reading and listening to smooth music playing from a record player in the corner. He sipped an amber liquid from a crystal glass, and folded his newspaper neatly in his lap. The top right corner read December 27th, 1954, clear as day.
“Uh,” Darcy muttered, “That can’t be right.”
From the shadows, a figure emerged behind the old man in his wing backed chair, silently moving forward. The fire cast a warm glow to his features, and Darcy gasped when they showed a familiar face. It was absolutely Bucky, looking almost exactly the same apart from a few faint lines on his face.
The Bucky next to her watched himself strike, that metal hand wrapping around the old man’s neck before the man even registered that he wasn’t alone. The struggle was short, the old man no match for Bucky.
The window closed soon after that, and Darcy felt that slight tremor of doubt again as she stood next to the same man she had just watched murder someone in cold blood.
Except when she looked at Bucky, he was staring at his left arm, jaw clenched and eyes wet.
“I don’t remember that,” he rasped, “Why don’t I remember that? Why would I do that?”
She found herself wrapping her own pale hand around his silver one, squeezing it hard even though it dwarfed hers.
“I’m starting to think it wasn’t really you. Brainwashed, remember? HYDRA are some sick sons of bitches, Buck.”
He kept his gaze on their entwined hands, but held hers firmly. If his was trembling, neither of them mentioned it.
“Let’s try again?” she offered, not letting him go.
Heaving a fortifying breath, he nodded.
The next few windows held much the same. The fashions, the technology, the time periods all changed, ranging, from what Darcy could tell, from the fifties on up to present day, but all of them showed Bucky, expressionless and mechanical, killing person after person. Some were quick, a shot to the head from afar or a dose of powder in a drink, and some were bloody and long, a few because they put up a fight and a few because…
Darcy didn’t want to think about those.
Through it all, Bucky watched, unblinking and unflinching.
After what seemed like hours, finally a window opened with the bellow of a train horn, and she felt him tense.
Unlike last time, though, the train seemed to be intact, no huge hole blown through its side. They were inside one of the cars, where some kind of fire fight was taking place.
And there was Bucky, but he was young, clean shaven, and, you know, actually emoting. From the looks of things, he was mostly emoting a hell of a lot of anger. He caught a gun tossed from offscreen and nodded in that direction. A blue and red blur whizzed past him, and he popped up from the crates he was hiding behind, firing off quick shots.
“I had him on the ropes,” he said, good naturedly.
“I know,” came another man’s voice, tinged with the same accent in Bucky’s, and then Captain fucking America ambled up next to him.
Darcy’s world was white noise after that. She missed the rest of the scene, the blast that flung Bucky from the train and Steve Rogers clamoring to save him and failing.
She missed Bucky’s subtle weeping, tears pouring down his face, but remaining upright.
When she did tune back into the world, it was to throw her face into her palm.
“Holy fucking shit,” she said into her hand, so stunned she felt tingling in her fingers and they faded back into the hotel room, “You’re Bucky Barnes.”
He pulled her hand from her face, and cupped her jaw to tilt her head up to where he could meet her eyes.
“And who is that?” he asked.