Chapter Text
Jane Foster was having a breakdown and there was absolutely nothing Darcy could do to stop it.
Her boss slash bestie had been hunched over her workbench for far too long. She hadn’t left the lab in days, the careful system Darcy had spent weeks putting together when they’d first moved to Stark Towers now a distant memory amongst the chaos.
Every surface was piled with stuff, gizmos and gadgets fighting for space with coffee-stained screeds of paper and notes on napkins. Every machine in the lab it seemed had been dragged into a haphazard circle around the desk of the lone scientist in the eye of the storm. Jane’s face was drawn and pallid, her eyes bruised purple from lack of sleep to the point she looked like she’d been punched in the face. Twice.
“Jesus,” Darcy muttered as she watched Jane stab another pen into the bird's nest on top of her head, half the stationery in the lab now snarled up in her hair, “I love you Jane, but this is so not a good look on you.”
“I’m gonna figure it out,” Jane nodded, her eyes never leaving her work, distant and cloudy as her hands shook. Her ink-stained fingers slipped as she tried to fix a little L-shaped converter into place on the broken machine in front of her and failed, “damn.”
A thin line of blood welled on the pad of Jane’s thumb, Darcy watching in quiet horror as the scatterbrain scientist sucked it absently into her mouth. It was about the only iron she’d gotten in weeks by Darcy’s reckoning.
“You can’t keep this up,” she sighed when the silence dragged, hovering over Jane’s shoulders like an anxious bumble bee, “just take a break, please, five minutes, clean up, get some sleep.”
It was pointless, she knew it was pointless, but her heart jumped anyway when Jane slumped back in her chair. Shoulders falling like someone had cut her strings, like she’d just finally realised how untenable her current course of action was in the long run.
Sighing, Jane reached for a discarded box of tissues, pulling one loose and wrapping it around her thumb as she stared at the cluttered desk like she was suddenly seeing it for the cry for help it was.
Maybe… maybe ...
Exhaling sharply Jane shook herself, forcing her spine straight as she reached for the converter again and started over.
“I’m gonna figure it out, Darce,” she promised quietly, clicking the device into place at last, “I’ll fix it, I promise.”
Bile rose in Darcy’s throat, sour on her tongue as she turned away from the mess.
“I know Janey,” she whispered back as she headed for the door, “I know, I just can’t watch you do it anymore.”
It was late, the corridors almost empty as she made her way towards the emergency stairs. One of the lab monkey’s from R&D was getting into an elevator as she passed but she didn’t join him, she didn’t know what floor he was heading to and she didn’t want to wind up down in the lobby again at this time of night, it would take forever to get back up again.
According to the novelty desk calendar in the reception area only two weeks had passed since the incident, but it felt like forever.
Being dead was like that.
Well, being maybe -dead. She was still fifty fifty on that one, the jury out on whether she was the worst ghost ever or if she was just dimensionally… displaced.
The world at large seemed to have settled on dead, but Jane, wonderful human disaster Jane, still believed in her. There was no body after all, nothing to bury or burn or sit Shiva over, no reason for a funeral. Jane had made it clear she believed that Darcy was still out there somewhere, maybe even on Asgard, just waiting to be rescued.
She had no idea.
She couldn’t hear Darcy, or feel her as she swiped helplessly at her, no one could. Not people or animals or kids - all that stuff the movies peddled about children being more sensitive to restless spirits was bullshit. Darcy had jumped up and down in front of a school group in the lobby shouting obscenities for a full hour that first week before she’d given up.
Hayley Joel Osmet could kiss her ass.
They all could.
Bruce Willis, Patrick Swayze, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, Nicole Kidman - even Reese Witherspoon in that one movie with the guy from the thing. Ghost movies lied. There was no one who could hear her, no one who could see her, she couldn’t even slam doors or scrawl messages on walls or any of that Amityville shit.
There weren’t even any other dead people to talk too - despite the fact she’d shuffled her mortal coil in the most populated city in the country, in the same building a terrifying space battle had happened only a few years before. The tower should have been crawling with ghosts, shield agents, civilians, aliens - if aliens even had ghosts.
But no, she was alone and useless and - worst of all - it was her own damn fault.
She’d done this to herself. She was the idiot, the stupid stupid stupid dumb-ass idiot who’d gotten herself vapourized like a freaking moron. It only took a moment, her gaze on her phone instead of her feet as she mosied straight into the path of their latest experiment. She remembered Jane shouting a warning, too late, and the feeling of her phone slipping from her fingers, a burst of light blinding her and then… nothing.
No more Darcy.
At least not that anyone else could see.
Phantom tears burnt behind her eyes but she blinked them away, there was no use crying - she’d done that already and it hadn’t fixed a thing. Better to cling to what was left of her life with both hands before she faded away entirely.
To that end she stepped through a gazillion dollars worth of Stark Security like it wasn’t there and straight into the highly guarded Avengers Area of the Tower. There was no way she’d be allowed up here before she went bye-bye so that was a small silver lining at least - especially since she’d heard Captain America was due to make an appearance later that day.
If that didn’t distract her, nothing would.
—-
They were talking about him.
The name - his name, he reminded himself - being passed back and forth like a football as they shuffled down the corridor.
Bucky.
It still sounded wrong in his mind, like it belonged to someone else. Someone… cleaner. Happier. Whole. Bucky sounded like a person and he wasn’t sure if he still counted.
“If you’ll look to your left and right we have the emergency exits, stairwell and elevator - both requiring level 9 access and biometric scans for entry, just basic security y’know, only like twelve people in the world have that clearance,” the man giving the tour gestured to the heavy doors, an air of smug satisfaction infusing every word.
He reminded Bucky of someone, the face and the name, Stark. He felt like maybe he’d met a Stark at some point or another, maybe he’d killed one.
“This is the Time Out Corner, there’s a couple of them spread throughout the building but this is the nicest,” Stark rapped his knuckles against the plexiglass window of a large observation room, “They were designed with Banner in mind, for when he’s feeling a little green around the gills y'know, so of course there’s a top of the line selection of meditation music installed, great fengshui, a privacy mode for the windows, and hey - walls that could stop a Mac truck.”
It wasn’t at all like he’d expected. Big, plush, no damp concrete walls or cramped metal cots. This was built for comfort, which made no sense. Comfort was not a priority.
“No way,” Steve’s voice cut through him, anger burning in half-familiar eyes as he glared at the room like an insult.
Bucky almost wanted to laugh. It was nicer than anywhere he’d ever stayed before, even before Hydra, warm and light with almost comically oversized furniture in it. Sure that furniture was bolted to the floor but it was discreetly done at least, there was even an en-suite bathroom instead of the usual bucket.
Steve snarled at their tour guide, “He doesn’t need another cage.”
“Yeah, I do.”
He wasn’t sure who was more surprised he’d spoken, him or the others.
“So it does speak,” Stark raised an eyebrow, his expression was nonchalant but Bucky could read the tension in him. Tightly held shoulders, wary eyes, hands curling and uncurling as if he was seconds away from reaching for a weapon.
Bucky didn’t blame him, he seemed to understand the situation at least. Unlike...
“Bucky, no,” Steve hesitated, hands half-outstretched like he was reaching for Bucky’s shoulders and had stopped himself, the anger wiped clean from his face as his eyes filled with concern instead, “you don’t want this.”
“Yeah, I do,” he repeated, the rough scrape of his voice still foreign to him. The thoughts in his head were still tangled between languages, Russian and English fighting for control like his own personal Cold War, “y’dont know what I’m capable of,” he turned his gaze back to the empty white room, not understanding how Steve could see a cell when all he saw was salvation, “I don’t know what’m capable of.”
“Damn, this is intense.”
He tried not to flinch as Stark’s assistant spoke up, the quiet comment cutting through the tension. She’d been following them for a while but kept out of the way, her presence so incidental that Stark hadn’t even bothered to introduce her. It didn’t surprise him, Stark seemed like that kind of person.
“Like seriously, the tension!” Her gaze roamed over them with undisguised curiosity, like she was front and centre at the latest picture show.
She was summarily ignored, Stark waving a hand vaguely in her direction even as he kept his attention on Steve.
“Alright alright, don’t get your red-white-and-blues in a bunch, Captain,” he sighed theatrically, “the TOC is just for special occasions, human rooms have been set up right next door, nice and close in case Robocop here gets twitchy. Okay?”
“Fine.”
The moment held, seeming to stretch and shrink without respect to the known passage of time, then with a final flippant shrug it was over. Stark breezed ahead of them, already detailing the layout of the floor and the included services as he pulled open another door.
Steve shot a glance at Bucky when he didn’t immediately follow them, “Buck?”
“‘m fine.” He mumbled, looking back at the girl for a half second before following Steve inside.
She didn’t join them.
—-
“So I saw Captain America today,” Darcy whispered, perched on the sideboard of the science labs. Jane had passed out on the sofa in the corner, finally, leaving the chaos of the day in her wake. The pile of machine parts and half finished calculations scattered over the bench so complex that even Darcy, with her years of experience, couldn’t make sense of it.
“He’s like… ridiculously good looking,” she said to the air, it was easier to talk to her like this, less painful somehow. Part of her secretly hoped that Jane might hear her subconsciously, “almost too good looking if I’m honest, like just absolutely square jawed and clean cut and buff .”
Swinging her spectral legs, Darcy tried not to think too much about the physics-based nightmare of her new world. A world in which she could sit quite comfortably on the sideboard but every now and then her feet would clip through the cupboard below like a badly made video game.
Better to focus on non-headache inducing things. Like the Captain and his broody man friend.
“He was with this guy though - damn Jane, you should have seen him. Exactly my type. Still totally handsome, obviously, but not as - air quotes - ‘ perfect’ you know. He looked a bit like that guy from that movie we watched a few weeks back? Remember, the sci-fi thing you got mad at?”
Jeez, Jane had gotten so indignant, waving her pizza slice so wildly at the screen that the cheese had slid right off as she explained the known laws of space and how the film had just about ignored all of them. Darcy had laughed so hard she’d snorted tequila out of her nose and had to lie down.
Sucking in a breath she wasn’t even sure she needed any more, Darcy forced herself to keep talking, hoping the noise would distract her from the fact her heart was suffocating itself in her chest. What she wouldn’t give for another stupid movie night now, tequila nose burn and all.
“Anyway yeah, totally my type. Did I say that? Tall, long hair, kinda scruffy but in a hot way. The sorta guy who looks like he could kill a man with his bare hands but would also start crying if he saw a puppy? And I mean hey, I might not even be that far off on the whole bare hand murder thing - Tony Stark was showing him the Hulk room like he might need it. Weird, huh?”
And then there was that thing that the Captain had said, Darcy’s brow scrunched as she tried to remember it, something about not needing another cage? What did that even mean? He’d looked pretty normal apart from the fact he was wearing gloves inside, just tired… sad even. Even if he was apparently capable of terrible, Hulk-level things.
“It’s strange, there was something kinda familiar about him, but he wasn’t like a superhero or anything I don’t think, or one of those Shield types. The Captain called him Bucky,” she looked down at her hands in her lap, twisting the ring around her index finger where it had followed her into the afterlife. She wondered if it would disappear if she took it off, “I thought for a moment there that he… that he saw me.”
Which was ridiculous. She’d tried over and over and over and no one could see her.
… could they?