February 4th, 2017
I'm shameless, baby I don't have a prayer
Anytime I see you standing there
I go down upon my knees
February 4th, 2017
“Hey, gorgeous girl.” Darcy looks up, seeing the Skype call had finally connected. It’s their first since the Gala interview, because she’d needed a little space after that.
Not that she’d said as much. But Bucky had seemed to realize, and his texts and phone calls had all been easy and light.
“Hi.” Darcy feels nervous. She hates feeling nervous. It’s not like her, but apparently Bucky turns her into a different person. She doesn’t know how to tell him that she just wants to feel like herself again. Especially without seeing that disappointed look in his eyes that he’ll try to hide from her.
“Good to see your face. Been stuck here with Barton for two weeks.”
“Yeah, those pictures with the Eiffel Tower in the background look awful.” Darcy teases. She reaches for her water bottle and one of the journals she’d been reading slides to the floor. She casts it an annoyed look. Who even only publishes in print anymore? Why is that a thing?
“See you’re in New York.”
Because yeah, he follows her on Twitter. His feed has over a million followers, so he doesn’t ever directly tweet her, but a lot of times his tags include #doll.
“Yeah, we were flying commercial and there was something wrong. They landed in Philadelphia for repairs, and we had a six hour delay. Nat flew Thor down to pick us up, and we’re flying out tomorrow afternoon.”
“Headed to Cape Canaveral, right?” He asks, eyes flashing with something that Darcy doesn’t want to identify. New York feels like his city, and she’d felt strange flying in, especially knowing that she would have made other arrangements if he’d been in town.
“Yeah, part of the press tour we agreed to. We’ll stay there for the next two weeks before we leave. It’s not announced, but Thor’s going to come down with us.” Darcy smiles a little. “You know how much he loves the space program.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Bucky asks. He’s sitting in a forest green arm chair, and there’s a bright blue wall behind him. He and Clint are staying at Natasha’s apartment, and from what Darcy has seen, she wants to visit badly.
“I’ll send you a shirt.” Darcy promises, because as big of a fan of the space program as Thor is, Bucky is a bigger one. He’d read science fiction novels like crazy growing up, and he’s continually amazed that humans walked on the moon, that they keep launching themselves into space. Propelled by explosions, Darcy, he’ll tell her with wide eyes. He’s a total fanboy for astronauts, follows the NASA twitter, and watches the launch feeds. (Darcy has seriously begun to suspect that NASA has an intern somewhere specifically tasked with answering Bucky’s tweeted questions, since he has such a large following and shares every tweet posted on launch days.)
“You stayin’ in your suite?” His eyes flick around her.
Darcy looks around at the strangely half empty place. “Yeah. I didn’t realize how much I left in here.”
She’s tempted to show him the picture she’d found tacked into the mirror of her vanity. It’s of them together up in the suite he used to share with Steve. Darcy’s holding a plate of food, and Bucky’s arm is draped over her shoulders. It’s from four years ago, his hair is still the Hydra special, and Darcy’s face is a bit rounder.
She’d loved that picture. It had been her phone background for months. It’s not an especially good picture of either of them, but it’s a picture of them together, damned hard to come by, and is very possibly the only picture in existence of them touching each other, much less looking like a couple.
She doesn’t show him though, because it drags them into the land of ‘us’. Darcy can’t handle ‘us’, especially not when she’s back in her old suite for the first time in years, sitting on the couch they’d made out on, and wearing a pair of his sweatpants she’d found in her dresser. Not that he knows that.
“You ready for your trip?”
“According to the US government I’ll never be ready. You should see the list of vaccinations they sent me.” Darcy isn’t even kidding. “Did you know they wanted to upgrade my passport? That’s part of the reason we’re stopping at the Kennedy Space Center. I’m signing some of the same paperwork astronauts do.”
“Doll, ya gotta stop talking about the space center when I’m stuck here watching Barton eat more crepes than should be humanly possible.”
“Did you see the ones he put pop rocks on top of?” Darcy asks, and laughs at his shudder. “He posted it and it’s totally trending.”
They talk for a while longer, until Darcy’s fighting yawns every few minutes, and then sign off. Words knot up in her throat as she gets ready to end the call, but she can’t get them out.
When the screen goes dark she feels bereft and lonely without him. But she also still feels uneasy and awkward. She loves him. She does.
But she can’t get back on track. Every time she’s on the phone with him or Skyping, she’s filled with nerves, second guessing everything she says even as it tumbles from her mouth.
That’s not her. It’s not who she is. She’s brash and happy and blunt. She’s confident and proud of herself and strong.
She’s worried the second she gives in, the second she goes back to him, she’ll lose herself again. She’d spent two years rebuilding herself, and the only time the cracks show is when she’s talking to him.
Standing up to Congress when they try to say she’s not fit to be Earth’s ambassador to Asgard? She fucking rocks their socks off. Speaking in front of the American Science Academy? Dude, they still don’t know what hit them.
She’s Darcy Lewis, doctor of astrophysics, epic best friend and science sister to Jane, lightning sister to Thor, and awesome human being in general.
But when she’s talking to Bucky? Or hell, thinking about Bucky?
She’s that girl who couldn’t get out of bed for weeks after he left her. She’s that girl that cried like someone had died when the first pictures of him on a date hit the web. She’s two steps away from being that girl who’d spent six months in therapy before she felt comfortable setting foot in New York again.