Chapter Text
James sticks his head into the room to ask what she wants for dinner and interrupts her as she's reading about their transfer to Istanbul. The politics behind the transfer (and Karpov's selfish anger about something that happened decades previously) are almost enough to taint the happy memories she has of her life there. James comes to crouch beside her, glancing down at the page she's reading. "Ah," he says softly. "Yeah, Karpov..." He shakes his head. "Well. It doesn't matter now."
"No," she agrees. "It doesn't. Look at this, though." She points out a section on the next page, the report of her return from a solo mission in Qatar, which is dated December 12, 1983. "That's when we married."
He smiles, reaching over to cover her left hand with his. That battered wedding ring that he bought secondhand in Istanbul is somehow still on her finger. Karpov didn't especially care that his assets had married; in fact, his written report expresses a hurtful sort of amusement.
My two little Pinocchios are pretending to be real, he wrote. He left yesterday to meet her train in Ankara, and when they returned today, she was wearing a gold ring. I have no idea where they found a priest willing to marry two people with no names, especially in this country, but apparently they did. It's quite entertaining to watch her; she rubs at the ring with her thumb like a real newlywed, like she can't quite believe it's happening to her. If I didn't know better, I'd think she was actually in love with him - and he with her, come to that! And watching them interact with the little Turkish boy assigned to fetch and carry for them, you'd almost think them a real family. Of course that is impossible; the technicians assure me that the wipes completely remove all trace of human emotion.
It matters not. I know that there are only a few years left for me, and I wish to spend them watching these twisted creatures defend my life. I almost feel sorry for them, as they tense up whenever anyone approaches, ready to dive in front of a bullet for me. It will never make up for what the Americans did to me in the war, how they shamed me in front of my own men, but even after all these years, it still makes me smile to see Captain America's partner serving Mother Russia, and even more so to see him do it in the company of his lovely little soul mate. Let us see what kind of damage they can do to their country's efforts in the Middle East. These next few years should be amusing. I am glad that Yuri transferred me. To hell with him.
Darcy rubs at her wedding ring with her thumb - a habit now, after so many years, that she doesn't really care about breaking. She can only assume that the HYDRA agents who activated them in D.C. didn't notice the ring, because it seems the kind of thing they would have been opposed to. She's grateful for that; its loss wouldn't have been devastating, but it would definitely have hurt. Because whatever the technicians may have promised Karpov, human emotion was maybe the only thing they didn't take away.
"I love you, you know," he murmurs, leaning down to press a gentle kiss to her temple. "No matter what. Whether you get your memories back or don't, regardless of anything HYDRA or the Red Room did to either of us." He turns his arm over, exposing the girlish handwriting there.
She runs a finger across the marked skin. "I was so young when they took me," she says. She flips back to the original picture of herself at thirteen. "They just scooped out everything and turned me into a monster."
"No," he says firmly. "Not a monster." He tugs her chin up to make her look at him. "We did what we were programmed to do, and what we had to do to survive. That doesn't make us monsters."
She's not convinced, but she lets it go for now. Instead, she turns back to the reports. "I wonder what happened to little Mehmet," she says.
"I don't know," he replies. "Maybe we can go to Istanbul and try to find him."
"Maybe." She sighs, closing the folder and setting it aside.
He stands up. "Come out and talk with us?"
"In a bit." She gives him a slight, tired smile. "I need to think about this."
He nods. "We were thinking of ordering Chinese."
"That's fine. Let me know when it gets here."
He goes back out, and she leans her head against the side of the bed. She closes her eyes, second-guesses herself a few times, and then does something she's never done before. She connects to the Internet and actively searches for herself.
The first results are from newspaper archives: the reports of her parents' murders and her kidnap made national news. Headlines from coast to coast scream about the double murder outside Chicago and the disappearance of the couple's young teenage daughter. All manner of wild speculation fills the articles of the time, anything from a targeted killing by a child-slavery ring to the idea that she might have killed her own parents and fled. Her most recent school photograph accompanies every article, depicting a pretty young pre-teen girl with long dark hair and huge, soulful eyes.
She doesn't remember ever being that innocent.
Her extended family searched for her for a long time before finally giving up; there are retrospectives and updates in the Racine newspaper every so often, clearly managed by her grandfather, who is often interviewed for the pieces. In a few of the later ones, her teenage photo is run alongside an artist's rendering of what she might look like now, five years or ten years after her disappearance. Anyone with information is encouraged to call.
She sighs softly at the age-progressed image showing what she might look like at twenty-three; it was published in 1975. Technically, she is sixty-one years old, but by her own count, she has less than twenty-five years of lived experience. She wonders how many years James has.
One of her cousins is now the chairperson of a national foundation dedicated to missing and exploited children; it bears Darcy's name. She really isn't sure how she feels about that.
She drops the Internet connection and opens her eyes at a tap on the door frame; it is Steve, looking at her hopefully with those big blue eyes. "The food's here," he says. "Will you come eat with us?"
She nods, pushes up out of the floor, and stretches. "Yeah, I'm getting stiff down there anyway."
He smiles. "You know, Darcy," he says, his voice gentle, "Bucky's been my best friend since we were schoolboys in short pants."
"I know," she says. "He told me, when he was getting his memories back. And sometimes he talks about you." She pauses, then offers, "He missed you a lot, when he thought you were dead."
"I missed him a lot, too," Steve says. "But... what I'm trying to say is... you're his girl. His wife, I mean. For, what, five years now?"
"About six and a half, if we're talking lived time," she corrects him. "Twenty-nine if we're being chronological."
"I don't count frozen time," he assures her. "I am not ninety-four, I don't care what Tony Stark says when he thinks he's being funny." She has to laugh at that, and he grins at her, big and bright. "What I'm trying to say, though, is that... I want us to be friends. Because he loves you, a lot, and I love him, and I want him to be happy, and you make him happy."
She cocks her head at him. "So do you," she assures him. "But I get what you're saying. And yeah, Steve, we're okay." She offers her hand, and he shakes it firmly. Then she says, "Come on, I can smell the kung pao chicken, and I'm starving."
"Me, too," he says, following her back toward the living room. "I don't know about the serum they gave you two, but the one they gave me makes me just want to eat and eat and eat all the time. "
"Metabolism times four, according to the files Aronov gave me," Darcy agrees. She leads Steve into the kitchen, where James is putting the food containers out on the tiny table. "So, yeah. We go through a lot of peanut butter and milk and things."
"You know," Steve offers, seating himself and reaching for a container of broccoli and beef, "I used to be allergic to peanuts."
"Punk, you were allergic to everything, " James says, dropping into his own chair and claiming a box of noodles. "I'm pretty sure you were allergic to air and sunshine."
Darcy laughs softly, listening to them bicker, and helps herself to the kung pao chicken. Watching them grin at one another across the table, seeing how happy his friend's presence makes James, she makes a decision in the back of her mind to let his happiness infect her. She doesn't know how to be a person, not really, but he does. And as with all things, if she lets him, he can teach her. So she closes off the part of her that wants to dwell on the contents of that folder, and she watches the two boys play, and she reminds herself that she's not a robot any more. She's a person now.
~*~
Explaining everything to Jane, who only got bits and pieces from Thor and was deeply confused because of it, results in exactly the kind of hysterics that Darcy expected; she sits back in her chair in the lab and lets Jane freak out for as long as she needs to before saying, "Are you done?"
Jane shuts up quite suddenly, considers Darcy, and says, "Maybe. I'm not sure yet." She folds her arms and suddenly glares at Darcy. "You did lie to me for a very long time about some pretty important stuff."
Darcy shrugs. "Fair enough."
Jane has, predictably, a million questions about Darcy's early life and training. Darcy answers them all in as much detail as she thinks she can give without Jane getting that poor sweet lamb face, and eventually Jane gets tired of hearing about death and destruction (and one of the machines lets out an alarm) and so the subject gets changed. Thor, with the instincts of a born diplomat, never brings up the subject again.
Tony Stark is harder to deal with, because he's desperate to get his hands on the tech in Darcy's head. He starts coming by Jane's lab, and she finally throws him out, appealing to JARVIS to enforce his exile. Once that happens, he starts coming by the small apartment that was assigned to James and Darcy when they first came to New York. He doesn't count on the fact that Steve, once reunited with his best friend, only went back to his lonely Brooklyn flat once to pick up his things, and is now living in their second bedroom. Tony's capable of being an asshole in front of Steve's disapproving stare and in front of James's best murderous glare, but the two combined - along with the hunting knife Darcy finally pulls out of her waistband when she threatens to cut off his balls - finally force him to back off.
It takes about three weeks after the Chitauri attack for Tony to formally invite them to move into their own floor of the main Tower, which has been rechristened Avengers Tower, in honor of the new team of superheroes that now lives there. Tony is extremely proud of himself for having managed to collect and cultivate this new team - never mind that he actually did none of the collecting or the cultivating.
Moving is a strange experience, because this time, they do almost none of the actual work. Tony sends a crew of movers to bring all of their things, and Darcy supervises them closely while Steve and James bring all the weaponry. There's no way in hell James is letting anyone mess around with his guns, and Steve doesn't let anyone but Avengers (and the occasional small child) touch his shield.
The new apartment is a four-bedroom monstrosity that takes up an entire floor of the Tower. Fortunately, it's one of the floors at the top, where the architecture is actually narrow and backswept, so at least it's a small floor. It's still far more apartment than they need, so they turn one of the extra bedrooms into an art studio for Steve, who is still living with them even though Tony protests that he built the next floor down just for him. (It's a mess of vintage and reproduction thirties-era furniture, decorated with wartime propaganda posters and an unholy amount of red, white, and blue. Steve takes one look at the place and refuses to have anything to do with it.) The other spare bedroom stands empty, its door resolutely shut, and Darcy thinks again of those Google searches, and she wonders when or if James will ever broach the subject with her.
Despite the unexpected roommate and the elephant in the room, it's still the nicest place Darcy has ever lived. The public area floors and fixtures gleam with sustainably harvested bamboo; the kitchen and bathrooms are tiled in terrazzo made of recycled glass; the bedrooms are floored with thick, soft carpets. The furniture is modern and attractive, the color scheme mostly neutral with hints of rich greens and purples, and the bed in the master bedroom is easily big enough for four people who don't even like each other very well to sleep comfortably. (The headboard is also reinforced with steel, and suddenly there are a lot of exciting new web searches going on in the privacy of Darcy's head.)
Still, none of this is important. The important thing is, as always, that they are together - Darcy and James (and now Steve, who has easily been folded into their lives, though not their bed, because Steve is apparently exclusively gay, which was not a thing that Darcy had expected). Living in the lap of luxury, or living in a shitty back-street motel in East Berlin, Darcy has never cared, as long as she had James with her.
Still, that massive bathtub with the jacuzzi jets? Fucking awesome.
So, dealing with Tony Stark mostly consists of taking his gifts when he offers them (because Tony reads rejection of his gifts as rejection of himself and responds poorly) and reminding him that her eyeball is off limits. It's really not that difficult, and she only has to threaten him once, maybe twice a month.
Dealing with Natasha is different, and it takes Darcy some time to decide on the best route to take. Eventually, she decides on straightforward combat.
She goes to Clint Barton first, because Barton is the one person whom Natasha trusts unconditionally. Darcy finds him one afternoon in the kitchen on the communal floor and she stands in the doorway when she speaks, her hands tucked into the back pockets of her jeans. "I'd like to ask you for a favor."
Barton, who was shoulders-deep in the refrigerator, pulls back and turns to face her, his expression carefully blank. "You're welcome to ask," he says, "but I won't promise anything."
"Of course not," she agrees. She takes a deep breath. "I don't know what Natalia – sorry, Natasha – has told you about our joint history, but there are many reasons for her to distrust me, and there are not many reasons why she should see me as an ally. I understand this, and her concerns about me are valid. But if this... Initiative is going to be successful, then we need to be able to work together and trust one another in the field. Right now, we don't have that, she and I."
He nods. "That... feels like an accurate assessment."
"So," she continues, "I'd like to train with her. Just once to start, but probably more afterward, if everything goes the way I hope it will."
He studies her. "What do you need me for?"
"I need you to stand there with your bow and shoot me if I need to be shot."
Barton blinks slowly, staring at her in blank-faced shock for a long moment. Then, slowly, his mushed-up face creases in a grin. "I like the way you think," he says.
She smiles back. "So you'll help me?"
"Yeah," he says. "I'll help you."
That afternoon, he settles himself into a nest near the ceiling of the gym, and Natasha comes down in response to his invitation to spar. She strolls into the gym dressed in workout clothes, and stops in her tracks when she sees Darcy standing beside the fighting ring. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm here to spar, if you want to," Darcy replies.
"So you can put a knife between my ribs?" Natasha asks, looking skeptical.
Darcy grins, showing all her teeth. "I don't know, Natalia," she says in Russian. "There was a time when you never would have let me get that close. I wonder if my skills have improved so much." She pulls out a knife, flipping it in her hand, still grinning. "Are you afraid to find out?"
Natasha's eyes narrow. "I'm not afraid of you," she replies, also in Russian.
Darcy laughs. "Prove it."
In one smooth move, Natasha is up and over the ropes and in the ring; Darcy follows her, rolling gracefully between the ropes and then standing up to face her opponent. Ostentatiously, she tosses the knife she's been holding out of the ring, letting it land on the hard gym floor with a clatter.
From above, a soft whistle sounds. Darcy does not move, but Natasha's eyes track upward. When they return to Darcy, there is a new respect there. "Trying to lull me into a false sense of security?" she offers, and now there is a note of humor in her voice.
Darcy shrugs. "At least you know that if I kill you, you'll be avenged."
Natasha grins then, full on. "That was never in doubt," she replies. "This just tells me how quickly it'll be."
Darcy rolls her shoulders. "So are we fighting, or are we talking about boys and braiding each other's hair?"
"We never talked about boys and braided each other's hair when we were children," Natasha replies, disarming herself. "Why would we start now?"
Darcy shrugs again, grinning. "I heard you'd gone soft since switching sides."
"We'll see about that."
The dance begins.
Natasha's style has changed greatly in the years since they had trained together; she is far more precise, almost balletic, and Darcy wonders if she's gotten dance training. Darcy herself, of course, has been trained one-on-one by the Winter Soldier, so her style is far more brute force – or, as Steve calls it, smash-and-dash. While Natasha spins and twirls, Darcy jabs and lunges. Natasha jumps and somersaults; Darcy dodges and rolls. They exchange blows, a hook here and a jab there; Darcy claims first blood when she catches Natasha in the lip with her elbow, but Natasha immediately gets payback with a heel to Darcy's nose.
James and Steve wander in, planning to use the punching bags, but stop and seat themselves on the bleachers to watch the two women. James winces when Natasha grabs Darcy's long braid and snatches her to the floor of the ring; both men cringe when Darcy applies a return kick to Natasha's crotch from her supine position before bouncing back to her feet. Clint climbs down from his nest and goes to sit beside Steve, and if Darcy were able to pay any kind of attention to the three men, she would positively gloat at the way Steve blushes and stammers at Clint's shy smile.
And then a sudden confluence of jab-dodge-twist-leap-spin kick-shove ends with Darcy on her face, both of Natasha's hands wrapped around her head in exactly the right position to snap her spine with a quick twist. The controlled power in those hands makes the fingers tremble against Darcy's face, and everyone in the room goes almost preternaturally still for half a second before Darcy's flat hand bangs twice on the mat, indicating her surrender.
Natasha releases her immediately, and Darcy rolls over onto her back. Natasha extends a hand to her, and Darcy takes it, letting Natasha pull her to her feet. She grins once she's upright again. "That was way better than it used to be," she says cheerfully.
"You're a lot harder to take down than you were when we were small," Natasha agrees.
Darcy laughs. "Hear that, Chefchen? It was all worth it!"
James snorts in reply. "Then why are you bleeding on the mat?"
"Because it's fun!"
~*~
James is the one who realizes a very important thing that somehow got missed in all the chaos. It's about three months after the alien invasion and they're standing in the gym after a sparring session when James turns to say something to Steve just as Steve strips off his shirt, and James stops, staring. "Stevie," he says. "You never had words before. When did you get words?"
"What are you talkin' about?" Steve asks.
James reaches out and lays his palm on Steve's left shoulder blade. "Right here," he says. "It says I can. "
Steve blinks, crossing the gym floor to stand in front of the mirror and twist, looking at the scrawl on his skin. "Huh," he says. "I didn't know that was there."
James calls across the gym to Darcy and Natasha, who have just finished their own bout. "C'mere and look at this," he shouts.
They come, and they look, and Natasha says, "Oh, my God."
"What?" the others all say.
"I know that handwriting," she says. "Wait here." And she sprints from the room.
James, Darcy, and Steve all look at one another in confusion, shrug, and begin cleaning up towels and equipment. About ten minutes later, Natasha is back - and she's dragging Clint along with her. "Take your shirt off," she demands.
Clint looks at her like he thinks she's finally lost it, but he knows better than to argue, so he pulls his shirt off over his head. Flowing across his lower back are the words Got a suit? in a neat copperplate hand.
"Oh, my God," Darcy exclaims, clapping her hands to her mouth. "Oh, my God. Steve and Clint! That's adorable! "
Clint and Steve stare at one another in shock for a long minute before Steve finally swallows hard and says, "Well... hi."
Clint laughs. "Hi," he says in return.
James rolls his eyes. "For fuck's sake," he says, giving Steve a gentle shove. "Go make out or something."
Clint chokes; Steve blushes bright red down to the middle of his chest and pulls his shirt back on quickly. "Um," he says. "Do you... wanna go get a hot dog or something?"
"Sure," Clint says quickly, to the accompaniment of chortles from the audience. "Anything to get away from this bunch of jokers for awhile."
"You should be thanking us," Natasha admonishes, grinning broadly.
"Maybe someday," Clint replies tartly. Then he reaches out and grabs Steve's hand, and they disappear down the hallway.
Natasha, still grinning, goes off to get her own shower. James slings an arm around Darcy's shoulders, leaning down to kiss her despite the sweat of her workout. "That's perfect, кукла," he says softly. "Everything's workin' out just like it ought to."
Darcy smiles, tiptoeing to kiss him back warmly. "It's good, Chefchen," she agrees. "It's very good."