Chapter Text
Darcy thinks, in her way, that she has loved Steve since the day they met on that elevator. It's a silly thought of course; how can she love someone she didn’t know? No doubt, it stems from the reassuring weight of his head on her chest, the sensation of his arms wrapped around her in the light of the dying afternoon. She should wake him soon if they ever hope to sleep tonight at a reasonable hour, but she can’t bring herself to do it when he looks so peaceful. She has a strange impulse to shield him - from the past, from the future, from everything besides their present, their here-and-now. It settles in her chest, heavy and grasping and completely alien to anything she has ever felt before, this desire to protect him from his shadows and demons.
Steve told her about Bucky in the soft, cautious way he used to speak to her when they were first dancing around each other. It took a lot out of him and was similar to the conversation they had about Peggy Carter only a week ago - sorrowful but fiercely unapologetic. He gets stuck in the past sometimes, mired in the what-ifs, but she can see his determination. He wants to… not leave it all behind exactly, but set it aside as another life lived. She doesn’t know if that’s healthy, but she doubts anyone in this world knows how one should get over losing 70 years of one’s life.
Closure is difficult to achieve when there’s a lifetime and Alzheimer’s between Steve and the first woman he loved and his best friend, his brother, has come back to him in the most perverse way imaginable. A monkey paw’s wish if she ever heard one.
Darcy sighs and her breath on his face makes Steve frown in his sleep. He looks young and vulnerable and it reminds her that he’s barely in his 30s. He seems older when he’s Captain America, looking at maps with furrowed brows or watching footage of fights with his mouth set in a grim line, eyes calculating. The weight of the world has been placed on his shoulders and he assumes the mantle willingly, but he’s not much older than she is and she barely feels like an adult when she’s at her best.
Darcy looks at the clock on her bedside table, then laughs at herself. She has spent a half hour just thinking about Steve. The Darcy of old would have yawned away her sappiness. Now, she’s just content. Smiling, she looks down at what she can see of Steve’s face from her angle. The setting sun outside her windows lights Steve’s hair on fire. He’s blindingly beautiful…
She traces one finger down the bridge of his nose, across the bow of his lips, and to his chin. His face twitches. Stifling a laugh, she does it again.
Darcy is halfway down the same path for the third time when suddenly, a hand springs out to catch her wrist. Steve looks at her with one eye.
“For future reference,” he says, “This is not how I want to be woken up.”
The way he is rubbing his thumb across her wrist makes her squirm.
Fighting to keep her composure, she teases back. “And how do you want to be woken up, Steve?”
“Allow me to demonstrate, Darcy.”
Before she even registers what he’s doing, he lifts himself up from her chest and rolls them over smoothly. One firm hand on her thigh and she’s on her knees, straddling his hips. She hardly has time for a breath before he pulls her down for a kiss. She can’t be certain, but she thinks he means it to be gentle at first. But the change in angle pushes her down on his lap, he groans, and they both lose control of the kiss. She pushes him away for a second, laughs breathlessly, then surrenders to him happily.
-//-
The labs are quiet today. Bruce, Tony, and Jane - Darcy’s intrepid scientists - are out shopping for metal sheets and lasers and stuff. Normal human things. Pepper is still in her office even though it is just shy of 6 in the evening. The others are in the battle practice gym in the basement because they are meatheads who like sparring in their downtime. Darcy declined to join them in favor of reading through Veronica’s reports. There’s a particularly promising one whose subject line she had barely deciphered before Steve had walked into her office to ask her if she wanted to practice with them. She had considered - his powers of persuasion, as she calls his biceps, looked amazing in his workout gear - but her spies have been particularly busy this week and she has a mountain of reports to dilute into something coherent and presentable to the Avengers.
She reads the decoded message from spy #17, code name: Hlökk, again. She frowns. Time to assemble, it seems.
-//-
Darcy has prepared the war room by the time everyone gathers an hour later. The air shimmers with the blue light of Jarvis’ projections - a photo of two men, a hologram of a scepter, two maps, a diagram, and a 3D floor plan.
Maria is the last to arrive. Darcy pats her on the head as she sits down at her right. She’s the first to get the write-up Darcy hands out to each person in the room.
It contains the message from Hlökk, decoded and written out painstakingly in Darcy’s own hand. She will burn all copies after the meeting. She won’t repeat SHIELD’s mistake of keeping digital copies of surveillance information. Not for the first time does she thank the gods that the Avengers aren’t bogged down by protocol.
There’s silence in the room as everyone reads the message. When Thor looks up at her, eyes shining in triumph, she grins. Darcy gestures to the hologram of Loki’s scepter, and begins.
-//-
The Avengers suit up while Jarvis readies the Quinjet. Thor is the first to finish since all he needs is to go out on his landing deck and call some lightning. Darcy is still not used to seeing him become The Mighty Thor. Jane is a blur of blue as she runs to him. Darcy walks past their thorough goodbye, resolutely ignoring the way Jane is basically climbing Thor. Not that Darcy blames her in the least… Jane will be in Brazil when the team returns in two days, if all goes as planned.
The locker room is quiet. The only sounds are the various clicks and bangs of everyone putting on their suits and checking their laces twice. Darcy doesn’t want to bother them, so she leans quietly beside Steve’s locker while he straps and buckles himself into his suit, determination etched into every line of his face. She knows this is a critical mission but her boyfriend is, like, so hot. She watches him tighten his thigh holster, which holds the handgun he doesn’t like to use. She’s… into it.
He picks up the holster that goes over his shoulders, which keeps his shield strapped to his back. Darcy holds out her hand. Steve hands her the holster, then turns around so she can buckle it on. She lingers a little; his ass truly does look spectacular in the suit. When she’s done, he turns to face her, follows her line of sight, and looks at her reproachfully. She ignores him. Looking around the room quickly first - it’s empty now - she steps onto his feet to bring herself closer to his face, then kisses him. Steve returns the kiss softly, then nuzzles the side of her face. Darcy sighs in pleasure; she wants to continue forever, but she steps off his feet.
“Don’t be a hero, soldier,” she tells him sternly.
“Of course not, ma’am,” he responds.
Steve squares his shoulders, takes a fleeting look back at Darcy, then strides out of the locker room to join the others.
-//-
For Darcy, the celebration party the night after the successful mission to retrieve Loki’s scepter is a blur. There is a healthy mix of people in attendance - Steve’s World War II veteran buddies, Pepper’s friends, models with PhDs, foreign ambassadors, Helen and her assistants - all people she likes and admires. Nonetheless, she’s glad when everyone leaves and she can take off her shoes and curl up on the sofa next to Steve. Nestled in the circle of his arms, she lets her friends’ jokes and banter wash over her, feeling calm for the first time in two days.
As usual, the serenity doesn’t last.
It seems one moment Darcy and Helen are giggling as they strain to lift Mjölnir together, and the next she’s standing in front of Helen, facing a murderous robot. She throws her stiletto knives with unerring accuracy into the pressure points of Tony’s Iron Legion robots, which are now inexplicably trying to murder them all in the name of world peace. The first one drops to the floor with all five of Darcy’s knives in its body. When another one advances on them, Darcy resorts to the throwing stars hidden under the piano. She’s less proficient with these, but she had not thought to bring a gun to a party in her own goddamn house. She’s lucky she even had her knives. She’s down to her last star when Steve jumps on the one flying above them, throws it to Thor, who demolishes it with his Hammer.
Clint throws Steve his shield, which Steve redirects to the last robot standing, cutting it in half.
Breathing heavily, he turns to them. “Are you all right?”
Darcy and Helen nod. Helen gestures to the big robot - Ultron? - who is giving another speech.
Her friends all look stunned. Darcy feels about the same.
After Ultron escapes, Darcy sits in a corner of the room while everyone voices their confusion, argues, and gets angry in turn. Her own anger is simmering just beneath her skin, but she keeps it on the back burner until they all see this through to its natural end.
They trudge off to bed silently. Darcy gives Tony and Bruce a wide berth as she catches up with Steve down the hallway. She expects him to stop at her door, but he keeps walking to his own room without a word to her.
She decides not to follow. She waits at her door for a second before she remembers with a painful lurch in her chest, that Jarvis won’t be opening the door for her. She presses her hand to the fingerprint scanning pad, blinking back tears.
-//-
The next few days are like nothing Darcy has experienced before. Her guilt clamps around her heart like a vice; she sent them all to the South African Coast based on a tip from Skalmöld, spy #4. She lays awake at night, trying to set the thought aside for the moment. It’s a fruitless endeavor; she can’t stop dwelling on the casualties of her bad judgement.
Her terror is paramount. She hasn’t spent a minute unarmed, even while asleep, since Ultron left them all with this mess.
She and Maria hunker down in the Tower and scramble to keep up with the people metaphorically banging on their door, demanding to know the location of the Avengers. There is not a moment of peace between the Avengers’ disastrous trip to Johannesburg, their sojourn in Clint’s farm, and the fight in Seoul. Darcy hears it all through the comms.
She can’t help but cry when they return home more or less in one piece. She had forgotten they were all human, that even Thor is not immune to death. The reminder is jarring.
She’s the first to reach the Quinjet when it lands. She wipes away her tears, but it doesn’t escape Clint’s notice.
“Those tears for me?”
She sniffs. “Yeah, for the tragic outfit you’re wearing.”
Clint laughs, but it sounds hollow.
In her periphery, she sees Tony gesticulating wildly to Pepper while telling her about Clint’s children.
Darcy wants to crow about how abso-fucking-lutely right she was about Clint’s secret family, but perhaps another time.
Maria leads them all to the war room, her eyes gleaming with purpose. Darcy’s eyes keep flicking to the door as Clint tells them that Natasha is in Sokovia. Darcy keeps expecting her to walk through the door and take her place at the table; she didn’t really believe until now that Nat was captured by Tony and Bruce’s genocidal robot child. There’s a lump in her throat from how badly she wants Natasha back, how badly she needs her family to be whole again.
What she gets instead are two teenagers operating on a thirst for revenge. She doesn’t trust the Maximoff twins as far as she can throw them, but they need bodies on the ground in Sokovia, so she won’t advise the team to turn them away.
She wonders when she became the kind of person who sees two orphaned teenagers as soldiers in her war.
The others plan out battle strategies while they wait for Thor to return. Erik had advised them that he’s on his way. In the midst of the discussion, Bruce silently glowers at the twins. He doesn’t bother to hide his animosity and Darcy doesn’t blame him. She leaves them to it.
In her office, she fast forwards through Veronica’s surveillance of Baron Strucker’s castle since the night they regained Loki’s scepter. She wishes she could unsee the vast numbers of Ultron clones in the making. She sends the footage to the war room TV. She sits, unfeeling, for a while, then presses the heels of her hands into her eyes. Exhaling deeply, she rises wearily from her chair and goes to the others who are already watching the footage.
When she catches Steve’s eye, she asks quietly, “Captain, may I speak with you for a moment in my office?”
He gets up from his chair just as wearily as she did from hers. Pepper’s eyes follow them out of the room. Darcy resolutely avoids her eyes.
Once they reach her office on the other side of the labs, she closes the door and makes sure the glass turns opaque. She leans against the wall, hands clenched at her side. Her voice just shy of hysterical, she says, “This is insane. What you guys are going to do is insane.”
“We’ve fought this many before. Aliens,” he replies as if that’s supposed to put her mind at ease.
“Yes, and Tony almost died!” She could scream.
He pinches the bridge of his nose. She’s never known him to have a headache, but it seems like one could be brewing.
“Darcy, we have no other options. Nat is -”
“Give me two days,” she asks him. “One day,” she amends desperately. “One day. I’ll call Phil and Fury; I’ll get more - more people -”
Steve shakes his head. “We can’t ask others to clean up our mess; you know that.”
Darcy looks away from his sad smile. He crosses the room and takes her in his arms carefully. She stiffens, half wanting to turn him away, but then relaxes, letting her body melt against his. She’s rubbing her nose against his neck when a thought occurs to her.
“Oh, my god.” She looks up at him in horror. “You’re going to die a virgin.”
His face flushes red, belying the casual way he says, “I’m not a virgin.”
She huffs. “Whatever. I’m not letting you go off to war looking so... so virginal. Not while I can do something about it.”
“You want to, um, do something about it now?”
The confused expression on his face is priceless. She would find levity in it, if her boyfriend weren’t going off to fight hundreds of murderous robots made of the strongest metal on Earth in about an hour.
“Is this the time?” Steve asks weakly, but Darcy is beyond words.
“Shut up and kiss me.”
Steve, the consummate soldier, follows the order.
The kiss goes from tentative to boiling in a second. Darcy is nearly vibrating out of her skin. She pushes him up against her desk, planting herself solidly between his legs. She leaves her hands on his thighs, stroking higher and higher in small increments until he’s muffling moans into her mouth. It doesn’t distract him from his own mission to map her breasts with his hands; she can’t exactly feel his fingers on her nipples through her bra, but she is rapidly getting there. She’s wearing a dress as she usually does these days for ease of access to her throwing knives. He’s in his suit, which makes their assignation more complicated than Darcy’s lizard brain can deal with right now. She pulls at it a little frantically; she has no idea how exactly he gets into this goddamned suit. He stills her by taking her hands in his, kissing her knuckles, and gently reversing their positions until she’s sitting on the desk and he’s standing between her legs.
“Relax, ok?” Steve asks her softly.
Darcy curses. “If you don’t fuck me right the fuck now, Steve Rogers, I -”
Steve kisses her quiet. “I will fuck you, but I gotta do something first.”
“What can you possibly -” She starts to ask exasperated. He cuts her off with a kiss.
He tilts her back, supporting her with one arm. With her arms around his neck and her chest pressed tightly to his, she feels calmer. She’s reeling a little from hearing the F word from Steve Rogers’ own mouth, so she doesn’t realize what he’s doing until his other hand has slid under her dress all the way up to her panties. She’s not wearing the sexiest pair she owns, but at least they’re not her period panties. She shudders as he strokes her clit through the thin cotton, building her up as slowly as he dares within their time constraints. She gasps when Steve tucks his thumb into her panties and pulls them to the side. His thumb is rough on her clit. She groans against his neck as he slides a finger in while rubbing her clit, making her squirm. She’s wet enough and her thighs are spread wide enough around his hips that his finger slides in without reservation. He lets her get used to that for a moment, then tests the waters with another finger. Darcy bites his neck.
Steve moans - quite loudly - and swears.
“Be quiet,” she hisses.
“Dreamed about this,” he whispers in her ear.
She kisses the underside of his jaw, nipping a little with her teeth. “Yeah?” She asks breathlessly as his fingers speed up inside her. “Just like this?”
He looks at her, eyes dark with want. “In my office.”
She shivers. He looks like he wants to devour her whole. She wouldn’t mind.
He curls her fingers inside her once more, then kisses her. “You good?” He asks.
She nods enthusiastically. Finally.
In the blink of an eye, Steve drops to his knees, hitches her right leg over his shoulder, and, for lack of a better descriptor, dives right in.
When she moans in response, he moves his mouth off her clit and tells her softly, “Be quiet.”
Darcy narrows her eyes at him. There’s a glint of wet on his face. “Get up here.”
He smirks, an action so unlike him that her heart flips over in her chest. “Not yet.”
She thinks, on the whole, that Steve Rogers is a punk ass bitch.
He builds her up to a crescendo, using his mouth and his fingers, and sometimes just breathing her name against her pussy like it’s an epithet or a prayer. It feels like supplication or a declaration. She can feel the I love you bubbling up inside her. She’s not sure if it’s only due to the oncoming orgasm; she suspects it isn’t, but she tamps it down nonetheless.
In the back of her mind she starts to worry about the time. As if he can tell, he pulls her closer to his mouth with a solid tug on her waist, and licks determinedly into her. She has to bite her lip to stop a loud whimper from tumbling out of her. She thinks she blacks out once she comes. When she’s next aware, Steve is gently resettling her panties and her dress, driving her mad in the process when his fingers brush her pussy and nipples and stomach again.
She pants into his chest for a moment before asking, “Where’d you learn to do that?”
He smiles at her, his eyes soft in complete contrast to the way he was looking at her just a minute before. “I told you I’m not a virgin.”
Darcy grins impishly. “Proved it too.” She trails one hand down his abdomen, intent on her final destination, which looks fantastic even when reigned in by the suit - his cock, she’s talking about his cock. She’s almost there when he gently moves her hand to side, so he can pull her in for a full bodied kiss. The taste of herself on his lips and the feel of his cock against the juncture of her thighs makes her moan. Her hand makes a run towards his cock again, but Steve firmly sets it on his shoulder.
Darcy groans impatiently. “Look, babe, Thor will be here any minute and I needed you to fuck me, like, a year ago, so…”
He looks at the watch on her hand. She looks too. They have 25 minutes until Thor arrives. They have ages.
“Next time,” he says quietly.
“What?! Why?” Darcy has heard some shit from guys in her time, but this is the most ludicrous.
Steve curls a strand of her hair around his finger and kisses her again. It’s quick this time.
“I gotta go talk to the team, Darce. Look over our weapons and comms.” He rubs his mouth. “And wash my face. And hands.”
He grins at her in a way that would feel lecherous coming from anyone else.
She can’t believe this is her life. She sighs.
“You promise?”
He looks startled. “Promise what?”
She looks at him steadily, trying to convey how serious she is. “That there will be a next time.”
Steve sucks in a breath as if she’s punched him. Her heart sinks.
“I can’t promise that, Darcy.”
She looks away. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.” She pushes him away from her and levers herself off the desk, clutching it for support once she’s standing. Her legs are noodles. She winces at the wetness between her thighs; now it’s just uncomfortable.
She makes to head towards the door, but Steve clasps her hand. “No -”
Darcy bats his hands away. She’s never felt more irrational in her life.
“No! Listen. Darcy, please.”
She stops. Turns. Lets him pull her close by her elbow.
When he speaks, he does so slowly and deliberately. “These last few weeks with you - this last year and a half being your, uh, friend - have been surreal. I never thought -” His breath catches in his throat. “I never thought I would have this again.” He laughs darkly. “I never had it before actually.”
His face is fierce when he says, “I can’t promise you anything but my effort. Please understand.”
Darcy understands, but wishes she didn’t.
She takes a deep breath. “Don’t be a hero.”
Steve smiles. “I won't, ma’am.”