Chapter 16
It'd been so long since he'd enjoyed the simpler things in life.
As Alexander Pierce cried out for the thousandth time, begging for a reprieve that would never come, Mephisto sighed in contentment.
This was the life.
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"I," Natasha paused on the other end of line, hesitant, which made Sam's panic increase tenfold.
He interrupted her before she could continue, "What the hell was he thinking? He almost drowned! His dumb ass had a concussion that would have killed anyone that didn't have his thick, supersoldiered skull! And what does he do? He breaks into some poor nurses locker, steals his clothes, and sprints out the front door!"
He paced up and down the hospital lobby, police giving him a wide berth. Steve hadn't answered his damn phone, and, good Lord, he'd lost Captain America.
"Sam," Natasha cut into his pity party, "I might know where he is."
"Oh, you might know, huh?" he parrotted, suspicion lacing his tone.
"Alright, I defnintely know where he is."
"You know, four days ago, I didn't even know any of you fools," Sam looked heavenward, asking for strength, "Where?"
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Mephisto's evening meditation over his writhing trophy was cut short by an unexpected development.
"My Lord," Zarathos, a demon who had proven his competence over a thousand or so years, "I have news of Loki."
The Demon King smiled. Today was really coming together marvellously.
After his tête-à-tête with that arrogant buffoon of an All-Father, he had coaxed most of what had happened with his daughter out of Odin.
Learning that Loki had laid hands on Darcy had sealed his fate in Mephisto's eyes. He had admired the chaos that the wayward prince had wrought, even admired the young frost giant's gumption, but he'd never respected the child.
For that was what Loki was, a child throwing tantrums with no greater aim. All that potential wasted on increasingly pathetic and outlandish attempts to teach Daddy a lesson.
Mephisto could only hope his own daughter had inheritted his pragmatism to override any similar tendencies.
Time would tell.
"And where is the young prince?"
"With the mad titan, sir. He's with Thanos."
There went Mephisto's perfect day.
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"You didn't think, oh, I don't know, something like 'Hey, Sam went for some jello from the cafeteria, maybe disappearing and not answering my phone will give my friend a damn heart attack'!" the new guy yelled, hands on his hips and staring down the greatest soldier in history.
Said soldier was hunched over on the couch, looking anywhere but at the guy tearing him a new one.
"I'm sorry?" Steve went with, and Clint winced.
He tuned out Sam's response, knowing from his own experience with half-assed apologies that it wouldn't be pretty.
Thor and Jane were following his example and edged away from the spectacle.
"As nice as this suite is," he told them, "It's getting a little crowded."
Of course, that's when he heard the electronic lock disengage, swinging open to reveal Tony with Natasha right behind him.
"Gangs all here," Clint muttered, wondering if it would be worth it to bust out the beer from the minifridge.
Tony stopped in the doorway, clearly not expecting the crowd in front of him.
"Uh," he asked, observing Sam towering over a seated, cowering Steve and the far corner where Clint, Jane, and Thor had wedged themselves, "Did I miss something?"
Nat lifted to her toes and hooked her chin over Tony's shoulder.
"Seems normal to me," she said, smacking the gum she was chewing loudly in Stark's ear.
Tony blanched.
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By 3 AM, Darcy had given up on sleep. The bed was wonderful, the pillows were fluffy, and she hadn't slept in forever, but she was too wound up.
Having a should-be-dead hero from seventy years ago in the next room did that to a girl.
She wanted desperately to call Jane.
Jane would know what to do, or at least she would be down for terrible late-night hotel television. Darcy'd tried, but it wasn't as fun by herself.
When she'd agreed to help Bucky, she'd promised him that she wouldn't contact anyone, not until she really needed to so they wouldn't worry. At the time, she did it to soothe what she thought was his paranoia, but now knew was his real and justified caution. She didn't want to break her promise, especially when it was just for her own comfort. It'd clearly been too long since anyone had put Bucky's needs first, and she didn't want to be the latest on that very long list.
Heaving a frustrated sigh, Darcy slipped from her bed, planning on making use of the balcony off the living room to get some fresh air, only to find Bucky sitting on the sofa, head back, eyes closed and mouth gaping slightly.
She froze, not wanting to wake him up, but he'd acknowledged her with a "Hey," before she could make a decision.
"Hey yourself," she said, grabbing a blanket from her bed and joining him, "You know, I payed a pretty penny for that bed in there. Had I known you'd snub it for a couch, I could have saved a fortune."
"Somethin' tells me you can afford it," he kept his eyes closed, but that smirk was making a comeback.
"Not the point," she stretched out her legs, bracing her back against an arm, and nudged his thigh with her cold toes, "You alright?"
He rolled his head towards her and finally opened his eyes.
"You know I'm not."
Darcy felt her face flush. "Well, yeah, grand scheme of things, you are not alright, but I meant, like, relatively?"
"Could ask you the same question. You're doin' an awful lot for a guy you have a good reason to hate," he lifted her feet into his lap, spreading the blanket so it covered all of her and his legs.
"I want to call my friend, Jane," Darcy sighed, something about the quiet around them, the soft light of the moon outside, prompting her honesty.
Bucky tensed. "Yeah. Of course, you do. You're probably scared to death," he moved to push her feet from his lap, but she dug her heels in. Literally, and maybe a little too hard in such a sensitive area given the soft grunt Bucky couldn't quell.
"Oops, I'm sorry! I just didn't want you to move them. You're pretty warm," she rushed to apologize, watching as Bucky took deep breaths, "Also, you're not that scary."
"There is literally no one who would agree with you," he said hoarsely, still stiff.
"I bet Steve would," she said.
Impossibly, he got even stiffer.
"You know Steve?" he asked, hands clenched in top of her legs.
"Totally. Well, not really," Bucky glared at her, "I mean, I indirectly know him and can absolutely get in touch with him. It's why I want to call Jane. She can get Steve."
She let Bucky ruminate on that and shimmied so she's laying down, curled on her side, her bottom half even more draped over him. He let her.
"I don't," he started, but shook his head, "No. Not yet. I want to know more before..." he trailed off, and then switched gears. "You said earlier that he was famous. That we were famous, Captain America and Bucky Barnes. If he's so famous, how do you know him?"
It's a poor deflection, but she didn't mind giving him more time to figure things out.
"He is super famous, sure, but I know a guy. Well, a god, more accurately."
Bucky blinked at that.
"I don't understand half of what comes outta your mouth, Darce."
"Eh, you’ll get used to it,” she wiggled her feet into his lap, laughing at his wince. She snuggled into the cushion she was using as a pillow, and despite her insomnia earlier, she fell right to sleep.
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“If someone had told me she was missing, I could have helped,” Tony complained as he led the team into Stark Industries' DC location.
“I thought that Clint had done so,” Thor answers, sending Clint a dirty look like this was remotely his fault.
“Me?” he huffed, “It’s your friend that was missing! I assumed you sent that text to the whole team!”
“Focus,” Steve ordered, shutting them all up as they filed into a large elevator. Jane had to stand on Thor’s toes for them all to fit, and Clint got shoved into Sam's back by Natasha. "And Nat, could you please stop popping bubbles at everyone?"
"It's your fault, do you know how much gum I had to buy from that vending machine? They'd just restocked. You owe me twelve bucks, Rogers," Nat blew a bubble as big as her face and snapped it at Steve.
He wisely shut himself up after that.
Predictably, it was Tony that broke the silence as they reached their floor and exited into a marble floored hallway.
“Who tries to find someone using only a damn tablet?”
“It was all we had!” Clint exploded.
“Well, now we have a hell of a lot more to work with,” Tony said as he threw open the doors, waving them all into a spacious room. “JARVIS?”
“Hello, sir,” came the AI’s familiar voice, and several hologram displays lit up in various spots.
“We’ve got a needle to find,” Tony declared.
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If he were on a mission, he'd be asleep right now. He was in a secure location with downtime, protocol dictated that he eat and rest so as to perform optimally.
Which is why he wasn't sleeping. It wasn't rational, not even a little bit, but Bucky was starting to like rebellion in all of its forms. Not to mention that there was no telling what images his mind would drag up after tonight. He tried to recall anything other than him being a mindless automaton, a weapon wielded by evil men.
He could feel them, memories hanging on by a thread, but he couldn't reach them. There were a few that he could see, blurry and faded, but still there. Almost all of them were of Steve.
Steve, the small one, his friend, curled up on a single cushion on a wooden floor that creaked every time they moved; Steve wiping blood from the corner of his mouth and laughing like a loon; that damn train and all that snow.
Everything in his head was in fragments, rattling around, incomplete and out of order. Still, he knew Steve would help him, knew it with a certainty that felt foreign, but it didn't feel right.
Maybe it was going into a situation where he didn't know all the variable or have all the information, or it might have been simply too much pressure to face Steve's earnest face, 'you know me' ringing in Bucky's ears when, in actuality, Bucky didn't remember him, not really.
A tug at his fingers had him looking down to find that a loose string from the blanket had gotten caught in one of the metal plates. Pulling it free, he realized he must have been absentmindedly stroking Darcy's legs.
She'd fallen asleep hours ago, just laid down next to him and closed her eyes, like it was nothing. Like he couldn't break her in a million different ways.
Darcy knew he could, though, with exacting clarity. She'd watched him do it to how many others that very night.
And yet...
Here she slept.
He curled a hand around one of her ankles, laid his head back, careful not to disturb her, and thought it was probably time for him to do the same.
'He'd slept in worse places,' Bucky thought to himself as he drifted off, 'Hell, there was that one time with the cow manure and that guy in a bowler hat...'
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"I still don't understand why Bucky would go after her," Steve asked again, more muttering to himself as he scoured security footage.
Clint and Natasha shared a look as Jane let out a shrill giggle, then immediately darted to the other side of the room.
"So are we going to address that?" Nat asked him, as she went through hotel bookings for the third time.
"I tried," Clint said, dialing another motel to ask if someone fitting Darcy's description had checked in. They had to be sleeping somewhere, and Darcy didn't strike any of them as the roughing it type.
Then again, maybe the Winter Soldier had convinced her to go off the grid. It was mid-morning, and they'd been at this all night with no luck.
"Hm," Nat drawled, twisting to turn a calculating eye on Dr. Foster where she was talking to Tony across the room.
Clint snorted, "Good luck with that."
"I wouldn't need luck, she'd crack," Natasha scoffed.
"Yeah," he agreed, "But right before she was going to spill the beans, the universe would intervene and save her ass. It's like clockwork, I swear to God."
"I am not religious," she said and stood up, ready to make her way to Jane.
She'd only gotten a few steps before Tony chirped, "Got her! She's at the... Smithsonian? What the hell, why does her kidnapping keep looking more and more like a field trip?"
"It doesn't matter," Steve said as he rushed for the door, manic from too little food and sleep, "Let's go!"
As he passed Nat, Clint leant down to whisper in her ear, "See? Like clockwork."
She stuck her tongue out at him.
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"Are you sure this is a good idea, doll?" Bucky asked, pulling up the collar of his jacket and ducking his face behind it as an adorable little girl in a Captain America helmet and a tutu zipped past them.
"Yes," rolling her eyes, she flipped his collar back down, "Come on, Nosferatu. It's better to get the low down from a more accurate source than what I remember from college combined with Wikipedia."
He stubbornly popped his collar again, but dutifully followed her deeper into the exhibit.
Despite what she told Bucky, Darcy wasn't actually sure that this was the right move. She couldn't say that she understood why Bucky didn't want to talk to Steve, but she trusted that he knew his own limits. In light of that, the exhibit was the best option Darcy could come up with, short of getting mind meltingly drunk and forgetting his sorrows for a bit.
She was saving that one for if this outing proved disastrous.
The front of the hall was entirely dedicated to Steve, unsurprising given that this was his exhibit, and Bucky spent a good while reading everything he could about his old friend. Wisely, Darcy let him be, standing close beside him to remind him he wasn't alone.
When they entered the second room and were bombarded by a massive mural of the Howling Commandos, a young James Buchanan Barnes staring off from the wall, Bucky choked on a gasp. The noise caught the attention of an older couple ahead of them, and they looked around curiously. Darcy quickly linked her arm with Bucky's, hugging him close and leading him over to a bench.
"It's alright, hey," she cooed, setting him down and practically sitting in his lap, she was huddled to him so tightly.
Bucky wasn't tearing up like she thought he would be, but he was shaking hard. He tore the blue baseball cap from his head, and ran his metal hand through his hair.
"Buck?" she asked, gently cupping his cheek and guiding his head to face her. There wasn't much space between them, but Darcy thought the closeness might help him focus.
He blinked, long eyelashes fluttering against the delicate purple skin under his eye. She was shocked when he leant forward and rested his forehead against hers, but kept from jumping.
"That's me, Darce, that's me," he shuddered, breath washing over her.
She moved her hand from his cheek to cradle the back of his head.
"Yeah," she whispered back, "That's you. Bucky Barnes, total bad ass and war hero."
Bucky's trembling had stopped, Darcy noted distantly, but she was finding it hard to concentrate on anything that wasn't the two blue eyes boring into her own.
She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, was near enough to see Bucky's pupils dilate ever so slightly. The tension had come out of no where, but Darcy knew it wasn't the time. She eased back slowly, keeping her hands on him so it wouldn't seem like she was shutting him out. But Darcy wasn't so selfish as to take advantage of him like this, not here.
Bucky, for his part, flicked his gaze down to her lips once, comfortingly confirming it wasn't just her feeling the chemistry, but backed off, too.
She smiled at him, ready to lead him back in, when he suddenly looked over her shoulder through the doorway to the beginning of the exhibit.
"We have company."