Chapter Text
She’s learned not to talk about it. Whether out of fear or disbelief, people never react well to hearing her truth-- just variations on a theme, every time following the same pattern of finding them and losing them, over and over again. She’s experienced many lives over many lifetimes and she remembers them all.
Her name was Connie, and it was the war that stole them from her while they were still discovering each other. One was drafted and taken away. The other followed, and left her behind without looking back. Neither of them remembered their shared past that time, and they died as they always did, doing what was right. Her boys, lost to the ice before their time.
Outliving them is not a new experience. It’s happened more times than she cares to remember, but never by more than a few years. Those times are always the worst, living on without them, haunted by their ghosts-- a torturous wait for the cycle to come around again. By accident or deliberate act, something always moves her along to follow them eventually.
For Connie, it’s different. For the first time since all of this started, there is a deviation in the pattern. She lives an unusually peaceful life for almost 47 years before passing in her sleep.
When the next life, Darcy’s life, begins, it’s only a few miles away from where Connie had spent her last days. Anyone willing to search deep enough would see the timing matched right down to the second, and that too is a first. Never have two lifetimes been linked so closely before.
As with every other time, Darcy grows up with the memories of all the lives that came before and the knowledge that someday she would meet up with the new versions of her loves. She can only hope that they would survive long enough to remember everything as well. Most of the time they manage a few happy years with each other. Sometimes, like with Connie, they don’t. Those instances, always an extra level of heartbreaking, have been thankfully rare.
Darcy’s fascination with all things history, especially anything involving Captain America, was recognized early and indulged. Two complete collections of Captain America and the Howling Commandos bears still occupy her room at her parent’s house, -a 50th anniversary set and the original series that once belonged to her grandmother- and if Darcy made miniature Cap and Bucky bears to keep with her at all times, what did it matter to anyone else?
When an 8th grade field trip to D.C. brings Darcy to the Smithsonian, she finds a picture of herself -No, not her. Not anymore. Connie - and her boys tucked away in a corner of the Captain America wing. The shock of seeing her own former face in that setting is so overwhelming that she collapses next to the display in tears. She has to be carried out by one of the chaperones. The mockery it earns from her classmates lasts for years, eventually driving Darcy to graduate early and choose an out of state university to get away from it.
Scholarships cover Darcy’s first few years away at school, and she’s in no rush to leave. Despite being known mostly as a science and tech school, Culver’s library is better in every subject than any she’s had the opportunity to study at in far too many lifetimes. With no compulsion pulling her to move on, Darcy settles in for a while, determined to learn as much as she can while she has the chance. She already has enough memories, of far too many lives, where she wasn’t allowed that opportunity.
Many annoyed phone calls from home and a few half-complete degrees later, she sees a posting for an internship with an astrophysicist and knows that’s where she needs to be. She uses the skills she’s learned and manipulates the system to make sure she gets the position. There isn’t a lot in the way of competition, so it doesn’t take much to succeed, which makes her feel less guilty about doing it.
It’s a bit of a rocky start with Jane, but eventually they settle into an arrangement that works for them. They aren’t friends, not yet, but Darcy knows from the first meeting that Jane will be one of those people who claims a bit of her heart. She refuses to let the scientist’s less-than-stellar social skills get under her skin.
Meeting Thor was a surprise. The shock left her playing flippant about her knowledge of his myths, learned firsthand in another life. It took more effort than she expected to avoid slipping into those old memories, from a time many hundreds of years gone. She was called Ósk then, and her people worshipped his pantheon as gods. The night he spent on the roof with Jane gave Darcy an opportunity for some time alone, and no one, save a lone S.H.I.E.L.D sniper, noticed when she snuck away from the lab to spend the night in the desert. Beneath familiar stars, Darcy lost herself in thoughts of a past when their triad offered prayers and sacrifices to Thor and his kin for the blessing of a child-- a request they did not survive to see answered.
It takes a couple of truly life-altering events for things to finally click into place for them both, but finally Jane comes around to the idea that they can actually be friends. It isn’t long after that they consider each other sisters, and the determination to stay close means Darcy follows when Jane gets the opportunity to work in Stark’s labs.
She can feel that things are starting to change and she needs to be nearby when they do. But as they settle in and time passes, nothing happens. Darcy allows herself to be lulled into complacency.
It’s why she thinks she’s losing her mind the first time she sees Steve wander through the labs.
It’s not the sickly, scrappy boy that she -not her. Connie - grew up with that she catches out of the corner of her eye, but the soldier they made of him-- built to fight and protect, wearing the red, white, and blue. He looks the same as he did in the newsreels and films from so long ago, the version of Steve that she never got to meet, only see from a distance once when the USO Tour passed through. And while she doesn’t get a look at his face, she knows it's him. She feels it, the same way she always does, that this one is the real thing, her -no, Connie’s - Steve, not just the propaganda tool replacement that S.H.I.E.L.D has been parading around since Loki attacked Manhattan.
But something’s not right. He’s not like any of the previous apparitions that come-- that have always come, to be with her at the end. Always, except for Connie. She's never seen past versions of them appear, and never died before they’ve even met. Whatever skewed the pattern last time must still be at work, but Darcy doesn't know what that is or how to fix it. She doesn't know how to fix any of it.
Caught off guard by the feeling of wrongness, and the conflicting stimuli of two lifetimes worth of memories colliding so suddenly, it’s all too much to take. The room feels like it’s spinning as the tightness in her chest makes her lungs burn with the effort to draw breath. She has a passing awareness of a loud crash and pain in her side as she stumbles against her desk, spilling the coffee and knocking over papers and equipment. Jane’s voice calling her name fades out as everything goes dark.
The steady beep and whirr of equipment around her is what wakes her. It takes a few seconds to realize she’s in one the medical suites. Jane sprawls in a chair beside the bed, lost in her battered copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and startles when Darcy groans as she tries to move. Jane fusses over her, forcing Darcy to stay put as she calls in the doctor.
After a brief checkup, the doctor confirms that she's okay, but wants her to stay so they can keep an eye on her, just in case. Jane keeps quiet except to comment that in all the time they've known each other and everything they've been through, she's never seen Darcy faint before. And Jane's curiosity practically screams at Darcy, who learned to read that expression of hers before the first week of the internship was over.
And Darcy's been in this position before, knows that if she admits to seeing a dead man, the best case scenario is usually someone telling her it's just her imagination playing tricks on her and brushing it off with some odd looks. If they don't take it well... It’s just better not to think about that too deeply. It doesn’t take much to come up with a believable excuse-- to pretend it was just a combination of skipping a few meals and a lack of sleep. They've been busier than normal lately, so she's not technically lying about that even. All she knows is that she can't tell Jane the truth-- not her, not anyone. They won't understand. How could anyone understand what it means to her? Seeing either of them after they've died has always been a sign of her own impending death. And even after all this time, it never gets any easier.
Darcy shakes off the experience as much as possible, eventually convincing Jane that she's okay. And when she's released, things return to normal quickly-- she's very good at pretending everything's fine.
And then it happens again.
It’s the same as the first time, just another brief glimpse of him passing in the hall-- nothing spectacular or even memorable about it, if it had been anyone else but Steve . And as much as she fights it, tells herself it was just the S.H.I.E.L.D. double, she knows that's not true and reacts the same way again.
Jane doesn't entirely believe her excuses when she wakes up in the medical wing again, but has nothing to prove otherwise. Darcy keeps quiet and returns to work as if nothing happened and, after a while, the concerned and suspicious looks taper off.
Until it happens again.
She continues brushing off the dizzy spells and fainting, but she can tell her friends are worried about her. The more it happens, the more suspicious everyone gets and the longer it takes to settle back down. Questions about her health become more common, and Jane actually starts keeping normal working hours-- as normal as they can be for a job like hers. She makes the effort to ease Darcy's workload as much as she can too, and Darcy knows it's bad, but she can't help wondering if knowing this would have helped back when Jane nearly worked herself into a breakdown after Thor's first visit.
After the fifth time, Darcy starts getting her affairs in order-- preparing for the end that she doesn't feel coming, but she can't keep ignoring. When she hears Pepper is heading off to Italy for a couple of days, Darcy tries not to feel bad about playing up the recent concerns over her health as she asks to tag along.
Pepper is glad for the company on the plane, and the chance to see for herself that Darcy is really okay. They take the flight as an opportunity to get caught up on what they've missed, having not seen each other for a while.
Pepper, like Jane, turned out to be one of those people - her people- who held a bit of her heart. Darcy wanted to make sure Pepper would always know how much that meant to her, and while they didn't see each other much during the days, while Pepper dealt with business, they managed to have most of their evenings free together. It ended up being more fun than either of them had in quite a while, and if somewhere along the way Pepper casually slipped Darcy Tony's credit card and instructions to go wild in with her recommendations of relaxing places to go, no one else needed to know.
Darcy spends most of her days, not wandering the city as Pepper expects, but holed up in a private bank, getting everything set right, just in case. The bank, one of the oldest still existing in the world, is still run by the same family who had long ago helped her develop a system to leave everything she gained to the her that would come next. She’d been one of them once, many cycles back, and even after this long they still count her as family, even though they no longer share blood. Their loyalty has been unwavering, and it’s a beautiful reminder that not everything in her past is tragic.
And though she makes the most of her time away, Darcy is happy to return home, to the odd little family she's become a part of this time around. Knowing that things are taken care of after she's gone is a weight off of her shoulders and she settles back in feeling lighter than before.
Jane still watches her, worrying more as others comment on how much better Darcy seems to be, and no amount of reassuring seems to put her at ease. Even Thor has started spending more time around the labs, sticking close to Darcy when he can, making his concern known. It's sweet, really, and she loves him, but a small part of her, the part that once worshipped him, is still a little unnerved that he's real and here and actually her friend-- the most incredible older brother she never expected.
Then D.C. happens, and changes everything .