Little Do You Know
"You're my mission."
Darcy is too well trained to bolt upright when her dream shocks her to wakefulness. Her eyes still shut and breathing even, she evaluates her surroundings. From the vibrations around her, she’s on the quinjet, strapped into her seat as it flies back to the Tower. She's still wearing her tactical gear, her knives a familiar weight on her forearms.
"I can tell you're awake," Bucky says from beside her, his voice quiet. "We're almost back at the Tower. How do you feel?"
She pries her eyes open, blinking around the dim interior of the jet. “Like Thor and his friends have been having a party inside my skull,” she admits, wincing. His hands are firm but gentle as he runs them over her scalp, checking for injuries. He hits a particularly sore spot and Darcy has to strangle a gasp of pain. Something must have shown on her face, for he pulls back immediately.
Muttering under his breath, he hits the releases and rummages around in a nearby pack. He comes up with a water bottle and shoves it into her hands. “You need to stay hydrated,” he says. “You would’ve lost a lot of liquid crying.”
Darcy doesn’t feel thirsty until she takes a long pull from the bottle. It’s some high-performance drink that ends in -ade and she normally avoids them like the plague, but suddenly she’s parched and she’s emptied the bottle down her throat. Bucky finds her another and she finishes that too. As he stuffs the empty bottle back into the pack, the hum of the engines shifts in tone.
They both glance over at the cockpit as a blond head pokes out. “We’re approaching the Tower,” Steve tells them. He pauses, as if to add something more, but returns to the cockpit with that simple pronouncement.
Bucky sits back and tightens his harness. He goes to tighten Darcy’s, but she slaps his hands away. “I can do this myself,” she mumbles, tugging at various straps and hoping that she’s not cutting circulation to anything vital.
The quinjet set down onto the Tower roof and Darcy stumbles down the ramp on her own two feet - barely. For a moment, she can’t work out why Stark is waiting for them, fingers fidgeting nervously though he covers it with bravado.
“From the distinct lack of an extra Russian assassin and the way Lewis is wobbling on her feet, I’m going to assume it didn’t go well?”
“You could say that,” Darcy says.
“But we did get the file, as agreed,” Bucky adds, and Darcy’s attention snaps to her soulmate. How could she have forgotten the file? She’d been planning to review it on the ride home, make sure there was nothing in there she didn’t want Stark - or any of the others - to find out.
Bucky pulls a folder from his pack and Darcy makes an abortive grab at it. “Let me see that,” she hisses in Russian.
“Why?” Bucky asks, holding it out of reach, though from the wary look in his eyes she would wager he already knows.
“Was it you?”
“I can’t remember,” he replies, his gaze darting away from hers.
“How do you forget?” she demands. She carries her ghosts with her every day, is still learning to live with their screams.
Confused blue eyes meet those of a darker hue. “What-”
“Sometime this century?”
Stark’s voice breaks through and Darcy looks around to see all the Avengers watching.
“What if it was you?” she asks quietly, casting one last glance at her soulmate. “We can’t tell Stark, he’ll go mental.”
“That’s his right. They were his parents. He deserves that much.”
“And what about you, then? What do you deserve?”
“Whatever I get.”
Darcy’s heart breaks at the bleak acceptance in Bucky’s voice, finds herself nodding slowly as her shoulders slump. Reaching around her, Bucky passes the file to Stark, who takes it with a scowl and flicks to the first page. “What the hell? This is in Russian.”
Darcy rolls her eyes so hard, the pounding behind her eyes triples in strength. “No, really? We only retrieved it from a base in Russia.”
Stark doesn’t acknowledge her barb, turns to the elevator, muttering. “Friday, I need you to-”
The Black Widow plucks the file from his hands mid-sentence and flips through it. She frowns, returns to the cover page.
“Who was it?” Bucky asks, almost hesitantly, and Darcy finds herself holding her breath.
Romanova shakes her head. “I don’t recognise the codename. Who the hell is the Lynx?”
Darcy’s blood runs cold. “That was us.”
“What!? You-”
She easily sidesteps Stark’s clumsy lunge, his face twisted with rage. Bucky catches the man’s fist and uses his momentum to send him sprawling.
“It wasn’t me,” she explains, perhaps futilely, as Rogers and Barton rush to stand between them. “That’s what they called us. We didn’t get individual codenames, even when we went on separate missions. I think they wanted to build a legend around us, the assassin who could be anywhere and everywhere, but we defected before the name could spread far.”
Blowing out a breath, she takes the folder Romanova shoves at her and scans the page. The Cyrillic is both painfully familiar and strange, and it takes a moment for her brain to readjust. Given the dates in front of her, she and Katya had been in Egypt at the time. Flipping to the second page, she notes the gun that was signed out. A Dragunov. Only one of them would take a Dragunov as her first choice. “Yulia. It was Yulia.”
“Another of your sisters?” Stark spits, pushing past Rogers, though he makes no move to attack her.
She shrugs, her shoulders suddenly lighter. “Sure looks like it. You’d have to ask to be sure, though. Good luck with that. The last time I saw her was in Tuscany.” The relief of it not being Bucky is making her giddy, letting more than she had expected slip out of her mouth. Either that, or it’s the head wound. She reaches up to pat gingerly at her skull, catches Bucky’s concern.
“You should go see the medic for that,” Rogers suggests, and both her and Bucky’s eyes widen.
“It’s nothing,” she mutters, snatching her hand back. They have a doctor here? How did she not know this? How had she so quickly lost the habit of identifying threats?
“That’s what I say,” Barton advises. “It doesn’t work. It’s just Jade on floor 82, though, with a room of medical instruments and a couple of docs on call for the big stuff. We don’t have a full-time medical staff.”
“Maybe we should,” Romanova suggests. “Seeing as we seem to have doubled our quota of reckless idiots.” The pointed look she gives Barton and Rogers would be hilarious if Darcy knew it wouldn’t be soon aimed at her. As Barton and Rogers protest, she catches Bucky’s eye and sidles towards the elevator, him one step behind. Somehow, they make it inside without incident and Darcy relaxes against Bucky’s side as he orders it to the floor she has come to think of as theirs.
The numbers on the elevator flick past their floor and Darcy glares up at the ceiling. The AI doesn’t really have a location, but that’s where she imagines Friday to be. “What’s going on?” she demands.
“My apologies, Miss Lewis, but Sir has requested you been taken to medical,” Friday replies. “He does not wish you to die before he can question you further.”
Darcy grits her teeth, but there is very little she can do. There are no panels for her to pry open and she is not in the mood for scaling a lift shaft that’s some 90 storeys high to avoid a medical examination. Her head wound may slow her down, but Bucky should be enough to stop the white coat from taking advantage of her injury. She hopes.
The elevator doors swoosh open to a sterile white hall out of Darcy’s nightmares. Bucky’s hand on her arm propels her forwards, through a set of swing double doors and towards a large Polynesian woman in blue scrubs. She mouths some pleasantries, but the noise in Darcy’s head drowns it all out. Dimly, she is aware of Bucky guiding her to sit down. The medic shines a torch into her eyes and she flinches away from the splitting pain that ensues.
After some more poking and prodding, the medic presents her with a couple of pills. Darcy makes no move to take them, stares at the other woman stone-faced. Finally, the medic shrugs and replaces them in a bottle which she passes to Bucky. Her duty discharged, she returns to a small workstation and proceeds to ignore them both. Confused, Darcy gets to her feet and backs towards the door. The medic doesn’t look up and the pressure in Darcy’s head eases slightly as the doors swing shut between them.
Neither of them speaks until they are back in their rooms. Out of consideration for her aching head, the lights are dim, just barely bright enough to see by. Suddenly aware that she is dirty and sweaty, and her hair itches something awful, Darcy heads straight to the shower to wash the day off. Bucky makes to go after her, but she shuts the door in his face. She doesn’t bother sliding the old-fashioned bolt home; if he wants to get in, a few pieces of metal aren’t going to stop him.
When she comes out, clean and clad in her fuzziest pyjamas, he is waiting outside, face unreadable. “Doc says you should get some rest.”
“I’m not tired,” she declares, steadfastly ignoring her drooping eyelids.
“Liar.”
Darcy stiffens until she catches the sympathy in his gaze. She exhales slowly, shoulders sagging. “I don’t want to close my eyes,” she admits, lowering herself onto the bed. Bucky hovers, obviously wanting to help but casting glances at the recently-vacated bathroom.
“Just go,” Darcy orders, flapping a hand at him. “I’m not going anywhere and the tac suit looks better than it smells.”
A ghost of a smirk darts across his face before he obeys. She waits until he shuts the door between them before patting her ribs gingerly. They hurt, but she’s had worse. If she’s remembering right, they should heal on their own in a week or two. She can’t see it in this light, but she can feel the gigantic bruise already forming, purple crisscrossed with angry red lines.
She’s still inspecting her side when Bucky steps out of the bathroom, nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist. Backlit by the bright halogens, he looks like every example of male temptation the trainers warned them about. Mouth dry, she can only watch as he crosses the room to the wardrobe where the stash of spare clothes is kept.
“You’re still awake,” he notes when he reappears, dressed once more.
She shrugs, wincing when the action tugs at her ribs. “Like I said.”
Bucky disappears into the wardrobe again, re-emerging with a folded blanket that he shakes out and, his movements gentle, wraps it around her until she resembles a dumpling, only fluffier. Once done, he settles on the bed beside her, forearms braced on his thighs.
“Where did you learn that?” she wonders aloud, clutching the blanket close. It was hardly a skill taught at the Red Room.
He shrugs awkwardly. “I don’t remember.”
Darcy narrows her eyes at him. “I don’t buy that. How do you forget learning the art of folding a blanket burrito? And speaking of remembering, how could you not know if it was you who killed Stark’s parents?”
His forehead wrinkles. “They let you remember your missions?”
She starts to reply in the affirmative when she picks up on his phrasing. “They make you forget?”
“It’s protocol,” he replies automatically. “Debriefing after every mission.”
Debrief. That’s where that man sent Anya. “Bucky,” she says slowly. “What debriefing mean to you, exactly?”
A shudder runs through him. “The chair. They don’t put you in the chair?”
“No, what does the chair do?” She was starting to have the feeling that she’d missed something big.
“It hurts,” Bucky mumbles, almost to himself. “It hurts, and then you forget.”
Darcy worms one hand out of her blanket burrito and places it in Bucky’s. His hand closes over hers with near-painful force as more shudders wrack his frame. “So you forget everything?” she asks, unable to help herself, desperate to know.
Bucky draws a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes. Sometimes I remember if it’s been a while. Then I have to debrief again.” He looks down at their entwined hands. “They didn’t hurt you?”
A thin smile makes its way onto her face. “Oh, they hurt us plenty. But I don’t remember anything like the chair. I don’t think they needed it for us. We didn’t have anything they needed us to forget. If Rogers is right about who he thinks you are, you have plenty.”
“I don’t remember him,” Bucky insists. “I don’t. I — Your sister. Anya.”
Darcy flinches. “They would've sent her to the chair, wouldn’t they?”
“Most likely.”
Darcy opens her mouth to answer but a yawn splits her face instead. He looks over at her, concerned. “You should sleep. Why don’t you want to sleep?”
“Because then I’ll remember,” Darcy whispers, horribly aware of the irony. The one who can’t remember but wants to, despite his protests to the contrary, and the one who remembers it all too well. “I told you. I don’t sleep well with anyone moving around. Too strong a survival instinct.”
“I’ll stay right here,” he promises, looping their linked hands over her head so she is nestled against his side, head tucked below his collarbone. “I’ll keep watch. I don’t need much sleep.”
Darcy wants to protest that she’s fine, that she’s coped well enough these last few years on her own, but she doesn’t want to just cope anymore. They’ll have to get to the bottom of his missing memories, of her missing sister, but those are problems for later. For the first time in far too long she’s warm and clean and safe, and so she curls her feet up under her and lets her eyes drift closed.
She wakes slowly, head pillowed on Bucky’s chest. She’d kicked her way free of the blanket sometime during the night so it lies only loosely over her. Her left hand is still holding his right, and his other is stroking her hair. It would all be very relaxing if it weren’t for that infernal chiming.
“Shut up, Friday,” she mutters.
The AI doesn’t bother apologising this time. “Oh, you’re finally awake,” Tony says over the intercom, obnoxiously cheerful. “I’ve been going through the data dump Clint pulled before he crashed their system and I think you’re going to want to see this.”