Sad Ending
He didn’t sleep all night, listing out every possible scenario for the morning in his head. At around 7, he slipped out of bed went on his morning run.
When he reentered the apartment, he heard sounds of vomiting.
Quickly filling a glass with water, Steve walked over to the bathroom to see Darcy leaning against the bathtub. Her skin was paper white, lips cracked. But the one thing his eyes zeroed in on was the trickle of blood in the corner of her mouth.
His stomach lurched as he rushed forward to gather her into his arms.
She was ice cold. Her eyes were unfocused, darting all over the bathroom.
“Darcy, sweetheart, can you speak? What’s wrong?”
She was breathless as she spoke,
“I— I don’t know, I don’t feel well. My abdomen feels like it’s on fire.”
Steve clawed down the nauseating panic and lifted her into his arms. He rushed to the medical ward, grateful it was only a few floors above his quarter.
The next few minutes were blurry as the doctors took Darcy from his arms and put her on a stretcher. Something about running tests and confirming a theory.
Dr. Cho came out of the room about 30 minutes later, looking less than ideal.
“Captain, are you Darcy’s guardian?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Okay, we need to talk about Darcy’s condition.”
His blood ran cold.
“What— what condition?”
“Darcy is showing signs of stage four ovarian cancer.”
Cho’s next words sounded like they were submerged in water. No, no. NO. Not his Darcy. No.
He couldn’t hear her as she said Darcy should have been feeling something all this time. He couldn’t hear as she prescribed an ungodly amount of tests and medicines for her.
What he could hear was when she told him to start preparing.
“Preparing for what?” His voice was low, grating.
“Captain Rogers, this type of cancer at Stage 4 is practically incurable. I apologize for my crude words but I cannot give you false hope when...when we don’t have any.”
She patted his shoulder and just left.
He was in shock, he knew that.
Darcy was awake when he entered her room. She looked at him curiously.
“Did you...take off my makeup last night?”
Out of all the questions she could’ve asked, this was it?
“Uh, yeah. I know how much you hate going to bed with your makeup on.”
She nodded, taking a moment to process everything.
Then, she smiled. It was a rare Darcy smile, where her eyes lit up and face shone with soft happiness. Usually, it made his chest feel full. Today, he felt like falling on his knees and begging for her not to be taken from him.
“You’re so good to me,” she said softly, reaching for his hand.
It was the bare minimum. He’d done the absolute bare minimum. But here she was, looking at him like he was the most precious human being in the universe.
He took a seat next to her bed and stroked her jaw with his thumb.
“You’re my Darcy.”
She closed her eyes contently.
“Hmm, yes.”
“You’re my world. Darcy Lewis.”
She opened her eyes, looking at his face as it crumbled slowly.
“Please, please don’t take my world away from me. Please?”
“I love you so much Darcy, please?”
The tears fell from his eyes like a waterfall. Broken sobs wracked his body as he buried his head into her shoulder. Somewhere in the middle, he felt her small hands stroking his hair softly, whispering sweet nothings into his ears.
“I love you too, so much.”
Over the next six months, they were reduced to that position multiple times. After Darcy’s first chemo appointment. The first time she started losing her hair. Granted, some of those times, Darcy was the one breaking, her words of defeat muffled in Steve’s chest. He’d always convince her to fight by the end of it.
But his chest never stopped tightening. Not as her gorgeous locks became a distant memory. Not as her shoulder became skin and bone. Not as her smile became weaker and weaker.
Then one day, as her hand slowly stopped stroking his hair, and the steady rise and fall of her chest just stopped, he felt his Darcy-sized lifeboat disappear from the ocean in his nightmares, leaving him on his own.
He felt himself sinking deeper into that turbulent ocean as doctors poured in. Friends came next, holding him back when he tried to claw his way to wake her up. Why wouldn’t they let him wake her up? She was just sleeping.
And when they lowered the casket into the ground, Steve Rogers felt himself drowning.