Bygone

Darcy and Howard return to the lab. They’re analyzing an explosive device that was built around a SHIELD weapon designed by Howard. Peggy is angry that her tech was stolen, and Howard’s angry that she let it happen.

Darcy has worked with Howard enough to be of help, and that’s how she ends up flying into the Soviet Union with Howard and Peggy a month later.

As Peggy retrieves her team, her voice echoes down the tunnel to Darcy after a man urges her to hurry up so they can meet Howard’s disappearing friend.

“As you all know, I have never deigned to comment on my relationship with Steve. We were friends first and to the last, simply because our hearts were never in the right place.” Peggy says as she enters the hidden base. “In 1953, I learned why that was for Steve. Gentlemen, meet Howard’s disappearing friend, Darcy Rogers.”

Darcy recognizes the Howling Commandos from all of Howard’s movie reels and pictures. They stare back at her silence.

“Merde.” Jacques Dernier mutters.

“Yes, quite.” Peggy says.

“It’s good to meet you all.” Darcy manages, planning to elbow the shit out of Howard later for not giving her a heads up here. “I’ve seen Howard’s film reels of you with Steve, and I could see how much he thought of you.”

“You’re real.” Gabe Jones says. “Steve drew you. Must have been a thousand times.”

Darcy’s heart wrenches. She’d seen his art journals. Mixed in with the streets of Paris, cold dark forests, and lonely trenches are her eyes, the profile of her face, her stepping through a door, eyes happy, as she passes what she recognizes to be the marble entrance to the bank. Her and Rebecca leaning out of their window.

Dum-Dum Dugan just keeps looking between Peggy and Darcy.

“She disappeared right in front of Steve in ’42 and didn’t come back until ’53.” Howard says impatiently. “But it would be swell if we could talk about this later? When we’re not trespassing on a USSR military base?”

Three hours later Darcy is cold, her hands are covered in blood, and she’s berating Peggy Carter.

“This is the worst idea you’ve ever had! I can’t believe they let you run an international espionage organization!”

“You’ll be fine. We’ll draw them off.” Peggy shoves a heavy duffel bag into Darcy’s arms.

Dum-Dum hauls Howard up into the back cockpit, but he’s nodding along with her. Darcy winces at the sight of the blood covering the front of Howard’s shirt.

“That’s not the part I’m worried about!”

“Yeah, who cares about the enemy soldiers.” Dum-Dum says as he drops back onto the air strip. Darcy ignores him, even if he is the only making any sense.

“I’ve flown by myself exactly twice, and that was with Bruno ready to take over if anything went wrong! And it wasn’t a Russian fighter plane!”

“Soviet.” Falsworth corrects her, though he does look nervous about the plan. His right arm is held to his chest in a make-shift sling, or he’d be the one making the flight. “And it’s a surveillance plane. Outfitted with weaponry.”

Darcy looks down at the bag, which holds parts to detonate a time sensitive bomb and a few explosives, and then at Howard slumped over in the plane. “Are you sure there isn’t another, actually sane way to do this?”

“This is the only way.” Peggy tells her, holding her gaze.

“Well, I guess I’m flying Soviet airways. You do remember us Rogers don’t have a great track record with planes, right?” Darcy squeezes the duffel bag, then decides not to crowd the bomb parts. “Damn it. This is the last fucking time I come on an ‘easy’ mission with you, Carter!”

Darcy walks over to the plane and Dum-Dum helps her up onto the wing. “In fact, you’re all on probation except for Dum-Dum.”

Then she’s pulling the canopy down and locking it in place. It’s freezing in the cockpit and she has to sit on the edge of her seat to reach everything. She crams the duffel bag behind her, because why the fuck not use it as a fucked up booster seat? “Oh fuck. Fuckity fuck.”

“You’re such a lady, Mrs. Rogers.” Howard groans.

“You’re awake?” Darcy exclaims as the instruments all spin and the motor starts up. The plane starts to roll forward over the bumpy, snow covered runway. “How in the hell are you so calm?!”

“I’ve got three options, kid. I can die here, I can die when you crash, or I can survive the crash and take all the glory for our survival after you drag me back to civilization.”

“It’ll serve you right if I do crash, you fuckwit. Your wits are fucked. Oh, hell. Oh, banana balls.” Darcy mutters as they begin to pick up speed. “Okay, okay. Heimdall, buddy, please tell me you’re watching. Get Thor to help a lightning sister out with this wind, huh?”

They tip sideways on take-off, but Darcy manages to straighten them out.

She has a hard time letting go of the throttle when they reach altitude, but she has to track them on the map. She supposed to fly through the motherfucking mountains in a snow storm, hope that no one spreads the word that someone has hijacked a plane, and all of the little Soviet soldiers do their job and light up the peaks to guide her.

She has a compass and a map. Like she’s Indiana Jones or some shit. She also has three all important gauges to watch.

Why the hell did she watch so many of those Without A Trace documentaries? It had all been well and fine on her couch with her blanket and her Netflix, but now she’s flying out of Soviet Russia in a damn snowstorm and she’s got phrases like ‘controlled flight into the ground’ and ‘but in actuality they were flying forty miles south, directly into the gaping mouth of the Andes mountains’ floating around in her head in a forbidding voice. And that awful radio mystery show about the missing crew from the Chilean crash.

After about an hour she sees the first pinprick of light through the hazy snow. After that the others become clear, and she has to trust that they are lighting her safe way between the mountain peaks.

She clears the mountains and flies for another hour, southwest. Then she starts receiving radio instructions, which means that Peggy and the Commandos had held up their end of the deal and radioed in. Or they were already there, having made the climb to the tunnel, which is a hell of a shortcut.

She’s instructed to lower her altitude and decrease engine power, and to watch for her escort. She can’t respond without giving herself away to the Soviets who control her broadcast.

Her escorts appear behind her and Darcy continues to follow their instructions. Eventually one drops down from above to lead her to a landing strip.

“Howard?” Darcy calls back. “You still with me?”

He doesn’t answer, hasn’t for the past half hour.

“Rescue one, you are clear for landing. We have a med team on standby. I repeat, you are clear for landing. The strip is yours.”

Her escorts pull away and Darcy sees the strip below, yellow lights obscured by the snow. The wind rocks her from side to side.

Her arms shake with the effort of pushing throttle in. Her stomach turns as the plane noses down. Too steep, too steep, let it up a bit. The decline steadies a little and her eyes flick between the wavering lights and the instruments.

The landing gear hitting the strip is so jarring that Darcy thinks she’s crashed. She screams, and if she’d been in a horror film someone would be handing her an Oscar. But the plane bounces, which she thinks is headed for a roll, and then the landing gear touches down again.

Then she slides sideways and screams until the plane finally comes to a stop. Then she screams again, just for good measure. Her knuckles are white on the throttle and she breaths in giant gasps.

“Howard? We made it.” Darcy says, and her voice is shaking. “Option four, bitch. Howard? Come on.”

“What’d you jus’ callme?” He slurs.

She unlocks the canopy top and pushes it up. Ice rains down, then the snow invades the cockpit. Darcy crawls to her knees in the seat and turns to check on Howard.

“We’ve got him. Climb down!” Dum-Dum yells, already up on the back part of the wing and unhooking Howard.

Darcy swings her leg over the edge of the cockpit and drops onto the wing, then jumps down to the landing strip, dragging the duffle bag with her.

There’s a second where it can go either way for her. Where she can let the terror overcome her and feel cut open wishing for home, toast in the mornings, Steve saving her from rain puddles.

Or she can embrace it. And she’s the Darcy who faced down the Destroyer and the Dark Elves and tased a god. She’s the Darcy who traveled back in time and lived damn it. She’s Darcy Rogers, and she just flew a Soviet plane out of enemy territory in a blizzard with a bomb in her lap.

Aw yeah.

She’s the Rogers that’s here, and she’d helped Steve’s friends.

Peggy stops in front of her, hands on her hips. “Sloppy landing.”

Darcy wraps an arm around Peggy in a one armed hug and puts her mouth next to Peggy’s ear. “Shove it up your ass, Carter.”

Peggy throws her head back and laughs.

Darcy turns back to see Howard trying to direct the medical team as they carry his stretcher off the tarmac.

Peggy and Howard manage to keep her name out of it completely. She’s the dynamo lady pilot that shocked the airport crew when she climbed out of the cockpit. Newspapers dramatize it for weeks, and by the end of it the plane had been on fire and out of fuel, and Darcy had removed two bullets from Howard’s body in-flight.

She flies home to New York with Dum-Dum and Morita since the press is swarming Howard and the papers had a least run the description ‘black haired beauty’.

Morita teases that something will probably happen to the pilot and she’ll have to fly the plane, and he fully expects her to cook Christmas dinner at the same time.

“Buddy, I make toast, deli sandwiches, and pies. Steve handled the rest, so I didn’t kill us.”

In New York they stop at a lunch counter to eat, and then spend some time at a soda fountain waiting for Howard’s driver. They part ways on the sidewalk, Morita talking about being home for Christmas.

Darcy has the driver take her to the brownstone. Rebecca yanks her inside and then starts smacking her. “Dynamo lady pilot? Buxom all-American beauty?! Do you have a death wish? What were you thinking?”

“Becks, come on. It was the opposite. I wanted to live!” Darcy tries to inject some humor into her voice, but Rebecca isn’t having it. “Seriously. It was the only choice.”

“Besides not going into the USSR in the first place?” Rebecca demands.

But Darcy thinks she detects a little humor there. “You’re just jealous I got to fly a soviet fighter plane.”

“Ha, Rogers. I can’t believe you.” Rebecca’s lips twitch. “Well, how was it?”