Darcy Lewis and the Bedazzled Pillbox
Darcy still makes her rounds through the Tower, curls up contently with whomever she decides needs the extra attention.
She’s sprawled on top of Steve on the couch of the common floor when she sees it, stark white against the dark backsplash in the kitchen; angled just so to allow someone to see it through the doorway.
She files the information away for later and goes back to trying to get Steve to tell her about his first date with Bucky.
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The thing is: Bucky’s on a metric fuckton of medication.
Vitamins. Two different anti-anxiety pills, to help him get through life in general and to stop the all consuming fear he gets sometimes when he thinks he’ll slip into the Winter Soldier and never come out.
Antidepressants because he spent seventy goddamned years being held by a fucking Natzi terrorist organization and used as a weapon of mass death and destruction.
(Darcy’s maybe had some time to think about what she’d do to the people who hurt him. She knows that Bucky, with the help of Steve and Sam, killed them all. But, well. A girl can dream.)
He even takes something for his stomach, to help him keep food down. Turns out being periodically freezerburnt isn’t good for your gut. Who could have predicted that?
Bucky’s therapist makes someone initial when he takes his medication and if it’s willing or not.
Bucky’s therapist is also kind of an asshole and gives him a sticker for every week he takes his pills without needing to be bribed.
Sam prints out a chart and hangs it on the fridge. Bucky glares at it every time he passes it, but Darcy’s seen him smooth a new sticker on it with gentle fingers, so it’s probably just to fuck with Sam.
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JARVIS orders as many obnoxiously colored gemstones as one can find and has them shipped overnight to the Tower.
Darcy raids Tony’s lab for super-soldier proof glue and accidentally attaches herself to the pillbox she picked out just for this.
(It’s shaped like a seashell. Sometimes Bucky will let her take a curling iron to his hair on days when he doesn’t know who he wants to be. He really liked the term ‘mermaid hair’ when she bitched it looked better than hers.)
She has to beg Tony to save her since trying to scrape it off with a spatula ended in Darcy cussing out the broken plastic.
Tony kisses the raw patches on the pads of her fingers and sends her back up to her floor with work gloves that have his signature nanotech in them. She has no idea what that even really means, but she doesn’t get stuck again.
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“Why,” Bucky says flatly, poking at the pillbox Darcy set on the counter.
Today’s a bad day. His hair is greasy and his flesh hand shakes and Darcy loves him so much that her heart feels like a balloon floating up, up, up into the sky.
“Sometimes you just need ridiculous things.”
And it truly is ridiculous, kind of looks like Darcy grabbed handfuls of gemstones and flung it at the pillbox in a riot of colors that almost made her eyes hurt.
Bucky nods his head but Darcy knows he doesn’t mean it. It’s okay, though. He’ll understand on one of his good days.
___
Darcy decorates her own pillbox, a vague pineapple shape that looks like a sad palm tree if she quints just right, in varying shades of green.
Natasha helps her count out her antidepressants and cbd gummies.
Natasha carefully slides them into the little slots and slips in a Skittle for each day when she’s not looking.
Sam prints out a matching chart when Darcy slides it on the counter beside Bucky’s and hangs it on the fridge with a cat magnet.
___
Pepper, of all people, hands Darcy a pillbox shaped like a penis.
“Tony‘s idea of a joke,” Pepper explains, maintaining eye contact; and Darcy doesn’t have to wonder how Pepper’s the CEO of Stark Industries ever again.
“But you use it,” Darcy says, turning the pillbox over in her hands to study it. She desperately wants to attach every pink gemstone she can find to it.
“But I use it,” Pepper confirms. “And I think it’s about time for an upgrade.”
Darcy kisses her square on the mouth and cackles all the way up to her floor, already working out how she’s gonna give the pillbox a vein right up the center in her head.
___
Bruce chokes on his tea when he sees Pepper’s pillbox added to the collection on the counter.
JARVIS sends Darcy the video.
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Clint comes to her next.
It’s just a regular pillbox. She decks it out in purples and blues and spells out his name on the tab lids in neon orange.
Sam buys more cat magnets and hangs up the charts he made with them.
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Tony’s pill box is, unsurprisingly, shaped like Iron Man’s mask.
“At some point, it stops being ironic,” Darcy mutters, but she takes it with childish glee and glues terribly designed eyes on it.
It looks sort of possessed and she laughs so hard she almost pees herself when she uploads a picture on Twitter and Pepper retweets it.
Steve makes it the avatar on his Instagram and Fox News debates on if the serum means he can get addicted to drugs.
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Natasha gives her a delicate wooden music box and Darcy almost hands it back to her.
“I don’t know why I kept it,” Natasha admits, brushing her fingertips against the beautifully carved lid. “I guess as a reminder that I’m not the weapon they made me be. Can you fix it for me?”
Darcy has thoughts about smashing it with a hammer until it’s nothing but splinters.
(Natasha has whispered the secrets of the Red Room to her, when Darcy has a knife in her hand and keeps watch. She doesn’t know if it’s because Natasha feels safe or because Natasha’s skilled enough to impale herself on the blade and make it seem like an accident.)
JARVIS pulls up videos on how to fill the valleys in the lid instead, talks her through how to sand it down so the surface is smooth and she can mark even squares on it.
She makes everyone decorate a section of it, a collage of everyone who knows Natasha’s soul and is proud to call her family.
It looks nothing like a music box by the time they get done.
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Bucky’s having a bad day again so Darcy takes her craft supplies up to the floor he shares with Steve and decorates Sam’s pillbox at the coffee table while Bucky lays face down on the couch.
“Nothing I do is important,” Bucky mutters, breaking the silence.
Darcy puts the cap of the glue back on and tugs the work gloves off her hands before turning just enough to slide her arm under his shirt. Her fingers trace up and down his spine.
(Bucky’s like her, he has a thing for skin contact. He was cold for so long he forgot what warmth felt like, and nothing is as warm as skin. Sam thinks it’s a reminder that he didn’t make all of it up in his head.)
“Right now, your entire life is one giant ‘Fuck You, Hydra’. If that’s not important then I don’t know what is,” Darcy explains softly.
Bucky grunts into the couch cushion and Darcy lets him figure it out.
“They’re just not-“ Bucky pushes himself up enough that he can turn his face and look at Darcy. “They ain’t big, is what I’m sayin’. I should want to do somethin’ big, not lay around and hope for the best.”
Darcy curls her legs up and leans into Bucky’s side.
“Goals don’t have to be big to be important. Doing what you can to make yourself feel better is enough, to hell with what anybody else says.”
Bucky stares at her for a long minute and Darcy draws hearts on his shoulder blade.
“You want help with your project?” Bucky finally asks, and Darcy leans forward to kiss his cheek.
“You can sort out all of the yellows,” Darcy agrees, and Bucky slides off the couch to sit next to her.
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Sam’s pillbox has birds on it, the exaggerated ‘V’ shape Darcy learned how to draw in kindergarten.
It’s ugly and Bucky’s very proud of how atrocious they got it to look.
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Steve’s own pillbox is already decorated.
Sam and Bucky beam when he adds it to the hoard on the counter.
It’s shaped like a duck and lime green. Darcy can see the small ‘S+B+S’ written on the side in hot pink gemstones.
She hangs Steve’s chart up with one of Sam’s cat magnets and doesn’t tell Bucky she’s proud of him.
(He gets a little touchy when someone says they’re proud of him, goes cold and distant. There’s two whole pages dedicated to his reward system in the Winter Soldier file. Darcy knows that what was done to him was still a form of punishment.)
She hugs him instead, buries her face in his chest and melts when he props his chin on the top of her head.
___
Bruce doesn’t like pillboxes.
Darcy doesn’t question it, just glues flowers to the tops of his pill bottles and coats the sides in iridescent glitter.
Tony gives her a special spray to keep the glitter from spreading and Bruce lines them up in a neat row.
Sam buys more magnets and the front of the fridge is a little crowded, but it’s beautiful all the same.
___
JARVIS uploads a picture to the official Avengers Twitter.
It looks absolutely crazy, like a group of small children were left unsupervised and the pillboxes were the unfortunate outcome.
It trends for a week and opens up the discussion on mental health when Steve retweets it and his caption is about living with PTSD.
Darcy, and Bucky, reply with a string of heart emojis.
___
Fox News asks Pepper for a comment, since she’s living with ‘a group of mentally ill delinquents’.
The picture of Pepper posing with her own pillbox gets a million likes in the first fifteen minutes.
The video of Pepper at the press conference she holds, one eyebrow raised and the most unimpressed expression on her face Darcy has ever seen, goes viral.
“They’re human beings. They’re worthy of love and respect just for that, but since you seem to lack basic common knowledge I’ll explain it a bit better for you. I’m proud of the members of my family, myself included, for opening up about their mental illnesses and fighting against the stigma that comes along with them. No more questions at this time.”