Chapter Text
Darcy learned more about her Great-Aunt Edith at her funeral than she ever did in life.
Darcy remembered her as a quiet old lady who came to stay for the holidays and once every decade invited her family to visit her in the summer. She’d been a studious, learned woman who had pointed Darcy in the direction of her alma mater, Culver University, a decision which Darcy would admit had changed her life. Edith had been an introvert who moved to a state on the opposite side of the country to most of her relatives, choosing to live out her golden years in a farmhouse in rural New Hampshire.
Details like where she’d been born, what she had achieved, places she’d travelled to, charities she’d supported, things she did for fun, all passed Darcy by until Aunt Edie keeled over one day at book club and died.
She had been married three times but never had any kids. So everything she’d owned had passed to her younger sister, Bess, Darcy’s grandmother. But Grandma was now on her way back to the airport, along with Grandpa and Mom, heading home to California, and had delegated the intimidating task of clearing out Aunt Edie’s belongings to Darcy.
Darcy’s work could be done remotely. It was probably less depressing for Darcy to sort through Aunt Edie’s things when she barely knew the woman, compared to Grandma having to take apart her big sister’s home. Darcy’s task was to dig out a laundry list of heirlooms - photographs, family history, a silver menorah brought over from Europe in the 20s - and then clean the house and make it ready to go on the market.
Aunt Edie had never said a word to anybody that she was having trouble around the house, but obviously that was the case as Darcy found the whole place to be thick with dust and cobwebs, and packed with the clutter of a lifetime. Stacks of newspapers, magazines and books - sometimes still in the packaging they arrived in - filled any horizontal surface. Plants throughout the house had mostly shrivelled away from thirst. The smaller downstairs bathroom, attached to the laundry room, was the cleanest, though perhaps it was less ‘clean’ and more like regular use had prevented the mess from encroaching too far into it, leaving a path through the jungle of stuff. There was a similar path in the kitchen from the fridge to the stove to the table. There was, in fact, a dining room but that had long become a record of every hobby Aunt Edie had ever dreamed of taking up. As Edie’s health had waned, she had limited herself to living in this little circuit from the kitchen to the bathroom to the living, sleeping on the couch instead of risking the stairs up to her bedroom.
So there Darcy stood, in the front hallway of her late aunt’s house, suitcase still in hand as she faced the mountainous task ahead, wondering where she was supposed to even start.
Gravel crunched underfoot as Bucky came to a stop at the side of the road. The driveway he was about to go down didn’t look all that different from others he’d passed along the way; just a dirt path that disappeared into the trees, with a mailbox on a piece of dilapidated fence.
Bucky wasn’t even certain he was in the right place. This job wasn’t exactly on his doorstep, being in a small town in New Hampshire. Or rather, a couple of miles outside of it. It had already taken Bucky the better part of eight hours to arrive in the nearest town, with another hour hiking north along the side of the road on top of that, all while being chased by a dark, unfriendly rain cloud that threatened to drench him if he dithered or made a wrong turn.
The job had also been light on details, a favour for a professional associate of a friend. ‘Act as a bodyguard to some SWORD scientist’, Sam said. ‘You’ll like her. No problem,’ Sam said. Bucky hadn’t even met Dr Lewis yet and he was already running into problems. Firstly, that the driveway seemed somewhat overgrown in comparison to the neighbours’, making it look fairly unlived in. Although a scientist who supposedly carried cutting edge, proprietary technology around being secretive ought not to surprise him. Secondly, although the mailbox designated this as Number 12, which was where he was meant to be, the name also painted on it said ‘White’, not ‘Lewis.’
A quick look at his phone revealed that his coverage had vanished, all hope of checking his map or asking Sam for directions lost. Bucky hadn’t thought he was that far into the sticks, but he was on the edge of a river valley.
A gust of wind wrapped around him as the bad weather closed in, and Bucky decided that there was nothing else for it. He’d go up the driveway and, at the very least, find someone to give him directions to Dr Lewis’ place. And hopefully stay out of the rain.
Bucky took a few purposeful steps forward, past the mailbox, and suddenly there was a flash and he felt like he’d walked into a giant balloon. It bounced him backwards and forced him to step back or fall over.
There was nothing in his path.
There was nothing obvious on either side of the lane that could be generating anything. He hadn’t tripped over anything. He looked up for something, anything at all but found only the darkening sky.
“What the fuck?” Bucky muttered.
He reached out gingerly and was amazed to feel his right hand come to rest on what felt like the surface of a hard boiled egg, cool and firm but not rigid. He pushed, but met resistance , like the sensation of trying to force two magnets together on the wrong side. He could see right through onto the property; an overgrown path that curved up a gentle hill with the hints of house peeking through the trees. There were no lights or sounds that came as he tapped the invisible surface. Just a faint smell of ozone.
Bucky swapped his hands and gave the bubble and swift knock with his vibranium hand: a ripple of wispy, white light spread out over the surface, revealing a honeycomb pattern that quickly faded away and left nothing but the clear view.
A single drop of rain hit the bubble and trickled down onto the gravel at his feet.
Bucky was certainly in the right place, then. Who else but a scientist working for a clandestine alphabet agency would have an honest to god forcefield around their property?
But he’d swapped one problem for another: how to get inside? Walking full pelt into it hadn’t worked, nor had gentle pushes or taps. And there wasn’t exactly a doorbell to press. Bucky leaned in close and rapped his knuckle on the bubble several times, hoping vainly for an answer.
A loud crunching sounded almost right behind him and Bucky spun sharply around.
A USPS truck was parked just off the road, with a chubby young man perched halfway out of the cab with an uneasy expression on his face wondering what the hell Bucky was doing poking and prodding at thin air.
Neither said a word. He and the mailman stared at each other like a pair of startled alley cats.
A raindrop landed on Bucky’s nose, making him twitch and popping the tension.
The mailman also snapped back to reality, fetching a small stack of letters and approaching Bucky rather than the mailbox. The guy was probably in his late twenties, with mousy brown flyaway hair and a double chin.
“Hi,” he chirped, offering Bucky a handshake. “I’m Jeremy. Are you Dr Lewis?”
“Uh, no. She’s…” He let go of Jeremy’s hand and pointed his thumb over his shoulder, down the driveway, even though he hadn’t actually confirmed she was up in the house. He nodded down at the mail. “I can take that up, though.”
Jeremy nodded and held out the post. As Bucky grasped the letters, Jeremy’s happy public-facing smile fell a little at the sight of Bucky wearing gloves. The imminently inclement weather had cooled the air off but it was by no means cold enough for gloves. Bucky got a sinking feeling in his stomach, assuming Jeremy was about to realise he’d shaken the hand of the Winter Soldier.
“I was so sorry to hear about Miss Edie,” Jeremy said, staring up at Bucky’s blank face and still clutching the mail. “Ms White, I mean. We all called her Edie.”
“Thanks,” Bucky muttered, trying to look like he had the first clue who Jeremy was talking about. Had someone died here? He dearly hoped he wasn’t here to be a bodyguard for someone at a funeral. Apart from being awkward as hell, he hadn’t packed a suit of any description.
A big, fat raindrop landed with a plop onto the letters held between them, and Jeremy at last released his grip.
“Ah, okay, well… I’ll see you around, I guess,” he said, trotting back to his truck. Just as he was climbing back in, he turned back to Bucky. “Hey, what was your name again?”
Bucky ignored the fact that he hadn’t given it in the first place, and focused more on Jeremy apparently not recognising him, or just asking his name as confirmation.
“It’s Jim,” Bucky replied. It was not exactly a lie, just not precisely the truth either.
But Jeremy accepted it happily, giving Bucky a nod and a jolly wave. Bucky didn’t move, not wanting to be seen trying to figure out whatever this bubble was. They stared at each other once again as they each waited for the other to set off first.
Another drop of rain hit Bucky square on top of his head. Then another.
Jeremy caved first, starting his engine and driving away. Bucky waited until the truck went around the bend and disappeared behind the trees before letting out a sigh of relief.
The gravel and the asphalt of the road was becoming speckled with rain and the trees started rustling as the wind picked up. Hunching his shoulders, Bucky was not looking forward to how wet he was going to get trying to find a way inside this barrier and really hadn’t much clue about how to even start. He reached out again to touch the bubble, certain he was going to be met with the same result.
Nothing.
His hand hovered in thin air, with no reaction or surface, as if he were standing in a perfectly normal driveway. He took a few steps forward, reaching out to find the bubble again, then waved his hand for good measure. He turned to look back, judging that he had already come further than the forcefield by now.
He shook his head, wondering if he’d hallucinated the whole thing. Nothing was different, he’d heard nothing being switched off, nobody else was around.
Bucky shrugged his backpack further up onto his shoulder and marched down the path towards the house. The rain wasn’t going to give him much of a chance to take in the surroundings - the neglected edges of the drive being subsumed by the woods - as he broke into a jog.
The house that met him at the end of the track was not a warm, welcoming homestead but a shabby old mess, sagging under the weight of holding itself up. Forlorn and sad with flaking paint, gutters full of moss and weeds that hung away from the building, murky windows that hinted at a cluttered mess inside. The only thing that looked new was a silver satellite dish propped up against the porch railing. An even more rotten and dilapidated barn sat in the house’s shadow, along with a white pickup truck pock marked with rust.
Bucky made it under the cover of the porch just as the rain began in earnest. In addition to the satellite dish, he found the deck littered with plant pots, both empty and full of dried out soil and desiccated plants. The most alive-looking of them - a sickly spider plant - was holding the front door wide open, revealing what the windows had hinted at: a dusty hallway full of stuff. Bags of trash sat waiting to be taken away and the rug had been rolled up and rested on the wall, but they were vastly outnumbered by the stacks of newspapers and plastic crates of junk.
There was nobody in view waiting for him so he rapped his knuckles on the door and called out, “hello?”
A creak came from upstairs, with the sound of a chair scraping on the floor, then footsteps and a window opening with a crunch.
“Come on in. I’ll be right down.” The feminine voice sounded like it was coming from the window above the porch roof.
Bucky stepped across the threshold and realised why the door had been left ajar: the house had a cloying, musty smell and badly needed airing out. On his left were French doors leading to a dining room so packed full of boxes and piles of things that it was probably impossible to step inside. He glimpsed an oversized plastic skeleton leaning on a china cabinet, and a halloween garland of bats that had never been taken down from the wall. On his right there was a living room almost as packed, with a sofa that was clearly being used as a bed. As he walked down the hallway he glanced at the wall of family photographs, of generations of weddings and graduations and parties, the faces in them obscured by years of dust.
Bucky came to the end of the hall and stepped into the kitchen, while a door closed and locked above him. The kitchen itself was livable but this was obviously a recent development, with more bags of trash lying around and smell of strong cleaner replacing the dampness. Through the window above the sink, he could see a line of laundry getting soaked in the rain.
Footsteps tramped down the stairs, announcing the appearance of Dr Darcy Lewis; small and curvy, with gold-rimmed glasses and clothes that were meant for cleaning or decorating, all stained with grease and grim and speckles of paint. Her rich brown hair had streaks of dust where it had brushed against virtually anything in the house. She wasn’t exactly what Bucky had been picturing, except for maybe the glasses.
She came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. “Okay, so I owe you three apologies, Barnes. First of all, I totally said no to a bodyguard or security personnel or whatever for this, so I had no idea you were coming or I would have come got you at the station.” She alternated between waving and gesturing with her hands and folding her arms over her chest.
“Second apology - because I didn’t know you were coming, I also didn’t know to, like, get an extra bed ready.” She winced. “I hope you don’t mind sleeping on the couch? I’ve got sheets in the wash for me, and after that I’ll work on the spare room for you.”
Bucky pointed out the window and asked, “you mean those sheets?”
Darcy spun and looked at the rain coming down hard on the blue flowery bedspread and lace trimmed pillowcases. “ Shit! ”
But instead of dashing out to rescue the laundry like Bucky expected, she reached into the pocket of her sweatpants and produced a small box with half a dozen dials, like a repurposed guitar pedal. She turned one knob, pushed one button, and the bubble that Bucky had bumped into reappeared, a wave of white hexagonal pattern that covered the house and blocked out the rain.
“Neat trick,” he said, raising one eyebrow.
“You noticed that, huh? Just another thing to add to the apology list, I guess. If I’d have known you were coming, I’d have switched off my ‘technically top secret’ security and you wouldn’t have noticed a thing. What are we up to now? Four?”
“What was number three?”
Darcy thought for a second. “Oh yeah! Apology the Third: I am so sorry that this house is such a goddamn mess. I swear it did not look like this the last time I visited. Course, that was before the, uh…” she mimed snapping her fingers.
Bucky nodded and looked back at the cluttered hallway. It made some sense now, this poor old house had sat for five years without its occupant, gathering dust and slowly creaking itself into dilapidation; when she returned she probably didn’t have the energy to clean up .
“So Edie disappeared in the snap? And died after she came back?”
Darcy tilted her head, not expecting Bucky to already know the woman’s name. “Sounds like someone read the mission brief?”
“Got it from the mailman, actually,” Bucky said, remembering the letters now crumpled by his left hand. “Was she your grandmother or…?”
“My great aunt. My grandma’s sister.” Darcy shrugged, taking the mail from his hand. She glanced down at the letters and set them aside on the countertop. Then she gave an embarrassed wave to the state of the house around her. “Who, I guess, was having some problems. I mean, the rest of my family lives across the country; we didn’t know this was happening. She never told anyone, I don’t think. But, well, I feel pretty bad that this is how she lived, you know?”
Bucky nodded. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks. I can’t say we were all that close, but still.” Darcy folded her arms over chest as a cool breeze wafted into the house from the open door and window. However the bubble worked, it kept out the rain but not the wind. “She had a stroke and, besides, she was like ninety anyway and…uh…”
Darcy’s eyes widened and her posture stiffened as she remembered who she was talking to.
Bucky took pity on her; he smiled softly and winked. “Sounds pretty ancient to me, Doc.”
She relaxed with a quiet laugh, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. Smudges of dust aside, she had beautiful hair: it hung past her shoulders in soft curls, and shone in the light coming in through the window.
That light quickly faded as the storm draped over them and distant thunder rumbled in, muffled by the bubble.
“Should we close the door?” Bucky asked.
Darcy, far from quivering, was positively perky at the prospect of a thunderstorm. “You afraid of a little thunder, Barnes?
He shrugged. “It’s not my favourite. You mean your forcefield get-up is going to keep lightning out?”
“It’ll act like a Faraday Cage. We’re fine.” She returned the wink. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”
She led him back to the living room, where he dropped his backpack. Then she waved dismissively at what she termed ‘the dining room of no return.’ There was a laundry room and a small bathroom, which Darcy had cleaned up already. She told him he could help himself to anything in the fridge but warned him not to eat any of the food in the kitchen cupboards, not knowing how long any of it had been in there.
Upstairs led to a second, larger bathroom, which had been what Darcy was in the middle of cleaning and tidying when Bucky walked face first into her forcefield: a little caddie of cleaning products and cloths was sitting on the edge of the bathtub and the sink was filled with foam. But that, evidently, was as far as Darcy had gotten since she’d arrived.
The next two bedrooms were just as chock full of Edie’s belongings as downstairs. Darcy had explained that her great aunt had downsized when she’d moved in, sometime in the mid 90s - Bucky tried not to think about anything he might have been doing back then - so many of the clothes and paperwork and knick-knacks in the second bedroom actually belonged to Edith’s late husband. They were bursting out of the built-in wardrobes and stacked up on the bed: if anybody, Bucky or Darcy, wanted to sleep there it’d only be after a lot of work. The master bedroom was equally stuffed with Edith’s clothes, shoes, and jewellery, except that Darcy had carved a path into the bed, cleared the nightstand and stripped the bed.
As they turned back, Darcy placed her hand on a closed door, which Bucky presumed to be a third bedroom, and informed him that she was using the space as her office.
“I don’t wanna have to recalibrate the instruments, so…” She glanced at the door, then turned so her body was blocking it. “... I’ll ask you to not go in there, please.”
Bucky had been lied to more convincingly by Sam’s nephews. But whatever Dr Lewis was keeping in there, if it were of the same calibre as the bubble she’d generated around the house, he didn’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole. The instruments, whatever they were, might be the reason Darcy needed a bodyguard but clearly she didn’t trust him with them and Bucky saw no need to force the issue. Yet.
She took him back downstairs and out through the kitchen onto a small back porch, with a quaint little swing seat. It could use a coat of paint but still looked usable. She waved vaguely at the barn, with its ivy overcoat and warped, soggy roof, and told him there was nothing much in there except some rusted garden tools, and possibly a family of raccoons, and that it was an accident waiting to happen.
“You’re not in the market for a fifteen year old piece of shit truck, are you?” she asked him, gesturing at the pickup with her thumb.
“Not much need for those in Brooklyn,” he replied.
“Dang,” she said, with no sincerity or surprise whatsoever and Bucky couldn’t help but let out a little laugh.
Darcy stepped down onto the little gravel track that wiggled its way through the overgrown grass and fetched the sheets from the line, giving them a pat and a sniff test and deeming them ‘dry enough.’ She went back inside and dropped them in a laundry basket lying at the bottom of the stairs.
She put on a pot of coffee, the old machine rattling and gurgling into life, and offered Bucky one of the plastic patio chairs around the little card table in the corner. They sat, the plastic squeaking and creaking under them, and waiting for the coffee, listening to the dulled pattering of the rain and the ticking of the clock on the wall. Darcy picked at the veneer on the table a couple of times before leaning over to him.
“So, Barnes, this is probably going to be a pretty boring gig for you, right? Just sitting around, watching me clean up and do the least amount of DIY possible so that my grandma can sell this place…”
He already knew where this was going; as if he’d let her do all the work to get this place ship-shape on her own while he sat on his ass. But he let Darcy string herself along, giving her just a little bit of what Sam would call his ‘resting murder face.’
“I would be extremely grateful - and we would both get out of here earlier - if you were to pitch in, a little bit. Use those amazing superhero muscles to help a gal out. A whole bunch of good deeds. What d’you say?”
Bucky pretended to think about it, tapping his forefinger on his chin. “Well, my mother would probably come back and haunt me if I just sat back and left you to it. But I don’t know that I’m much of a hero.”
“Oh, you’ll be my hero, Barnes. After you go get the sheets off the sofa and put ‘em in the washing machine.”
Bucky laughed and got up from the table, holding his hands in surrender. “Alright, alright. You got a deal.”
He walked backwards into the hallway, then stuck his head back into the kitchen as Darcy was opening up a cupboard full of coffee mugs.
“But I want a reference. In writing.”
Darcy giggled - bright, loud and lilting - and quoted, “‘He flips a mean house!’ signed Doctor Darcy Lewis.”