Chapter Text
Dead Reckoning /ˌded ˈrek(ə)niNG/ (n) The process of calculating the current position of a moving object by using a previously determined position or the process of estimating the value of any variable quantity by using an earlier value and adding whatever changes have occurred in the meantime.
To put it another way: how to find your way into and out of a clusterfuck.
“Fuck, Lewis — move your, goddamn — there’s a good girl.” He hitched her higher against the wall, his hips picking up speed, and Darcy tilted her head back, her ankles locked at the small of his back.
“Not your good anything, Barnes,” she snapped, the effect ruined almost instantly as he forced an involuntary moan from her with a particularly rough thrust of his hips.
“Current position would beg to differ,” he said, his mouth trailing up her neck, his teeth nipping at the sensitive skin below her ear, not hard enough to leave a mark. Never hard enough to leave a mark.
“Could do with a little more begging, too, sweetheart,” he muttered, and Darcy could feel his stupid smirk against her skin.
“Go fuck yourself,” she gasped, her hands sliding up to tangle in his shaggy hair. He’d cut it two weeks ago, exactly three days after she’d told him she liked how long it was getting. She tugged on it until he grunted in pain.
“Happy to,” he quipped, “just as soon as I finish fucking you.” He punctuated the sentence with another rough thrust between her thighs, and Darcy grunted, her hands scrambling for purchase on his shoulders and against the wall.
“You hate fucking me,” Darcy pointed out blandly; she could feel one of his hands, the metal one, sneaking up the back of her shirt. He’d inevitably get it around front and on her tits.
“I don’t hate fucking you.” He used that inhuman strength again, pulling another gasp from her as he pushed her up the wall, his metal arm a buffer between her back and the rough cinder block, and suddenly the angle was so deep Darcy felt breathless. “Fuck,” she gasped.
“There it is.” He sounded smug. She dug her nails into his neck until she heard him hiss in pain. “That what you need today, sweetheart?” he asked between ragged breaths, and his pace picked up.
“Not your sweetheart,” she panted.
“Gonna make you beg for it,” he told her, and Darcy didn’t doubt that. He always made her beg for it. It was why she came back. It was why she was pressed between him and a wall outside the Camp utility building at 1 pm, in broad daylight where anyone could find them at it.
Her cunt was starting to pulse, her legs tense where they were wrapped around his trim hips; her jeans were still hanging from one of her ankles. His hand started to inch its way around the front of her body, sliding up her stomach and over her ribs to cup a heavy breast through her bra. “Gonna come on my cock, Lewis?” he asked, his voice muffled in her neck, and she tugged at his hair.
“Not like this,” she lied. He felt so fucking good. He had the perfect dick. Long, thick, with a slight curve, it hit all the right spots. He knew how to use it, too. He was more than capable of getting her off like this if he wanted. He just needed to slow down and grind his pelvis up against her clit, let her ride him until she got what she needed. And he knew it, the asshole.
“Nah, you’re gonna come,” he muttered, his fingers twisted at her nipple, and Darcy moaned loudly before she remembered where they were and bit down on her lip. “Touch yourself for me. C’mon, wanna feel you.”
She dropped a hand down between them, her fingers sliding through the slick mess between her legs as she skimmed over swollen flesh to find her clit. Her hips jumped at the first press of her fingertip to the hard nerve, and Bucky made a punched-out grunt, his rhythm faltering for the first time before resuming at a slightly faster pace. “Tell me what you need,” he panted.
“More,” she whined, and she was halfway to begging and hating him for it. His thrusts got even harder, deeper. The hand on her chest flexed, his fingers rolling a nipple through her bra, and she arched her back until she was only connected to the wall by her shoulders and the crown of her head, trusting he’d hold her up. “Don’t stop,” she gasped.
“Wasn’t planning on it.” He had his forehead pressed to her collarbone, and she just knew he was watching himself disappear into the clutch of her body, the pervert. “You gonna come for me?” He looked up at her, and his eyes were blown. Darcy wondered if she looked the same.
“Yes,” she panted, and she was. She could feel it building. The steady stretch of him inside her, her fingers working her clit, his fingers still rolling her nipple, the look on his face, his rough voice, all of it was culminating in a coiling tension that was begging to be released.
She pressed harder on her clit, chasing her finish, and she felt the walls of her cunt start to clench around him. She bit down on her lip hard enough to hurt, the hand in his shaggy hair pulling until he let out another hiss of pain as her whole body went tense. She could feel it — “so close, so close, so close,” she chanted softly.
“C’mon, Lewis,” he encouraged, pressing his forehead to hers, his hips snapping into her at an almost brutal pace, deep and so hard.
“Please, please, please,” she was begging for it just like he’d predicted she would. Her forearm was burning from the tight circles she was rubbing on her clit, and just when she thought she was going to lose her fucking mind, everything pulled so tight she was nothing but an aching nerve in his arms; it all snapped.
Her mind went blank.
Heat spread under her skin, and her hips arched forward into his, her body taut as she came with a soundless cry. She felt him give one, two, three more deep, powerful thrusts before he followed her over the edge, his face buried in her neck, muttering in Russian.
She came back to herself seconds later, practically boneless, Bucky still half-hard and buried inside her, his metal hand now tight around one of her thighs to help support her mostly useless legs. “Such a good girl, so good. Sweet girl,” he mumbled into her hair, his hips still twitching every few seconds.
She desperately sucked in air, slowly unclenching her hand from where it was still tightly tangled in his hair. This was the dangerous part. The part where it was easy to forget they weren’t actually a couple. And that she was supposed to hate him the 90% of the time he wasn’t actively fucking her.
“I’m not your good girl, Barnes. Put me down,” she said, and he went tense and then loose. By the time he pulled back so she could see his face, his trademark scowl was in place.
“Whatever you say, sweetheart,” he snapped, and he dropped her so fast she barely managed to get her feet under herself in time to avoid landing on her ass in the dirt. She ended up braced against the wall, feet twisted up in her jeans.
“Fucking asshole,” she hissed. “God, why are you like this?”
“You asked me to put you down,” he said. He was calmly doing up his belt, but he looked up at her through his lashes, his eyes skimming over her body, and Darcy didn’t miss the way they lingered at the tops of her thighs where she could feel their combined mess leaking out of her still sensitive cunt.
“I hate you sometimes,” she snapped, and she tried to ignore the feeling of his eyes on her as she bent over to grab her underwear and fix her jeans, pulling both on at once and grimacing at their bagginess. She was really going to need to find a belt or new pants soon. She scanned the ground for the hoodie and holster she’d shrugged off at the beginning of their activities. The hoodie was where she left it, and she pulled it on, but the holster was —
Bucky cleared his throat, and she looked up to find him holding out her shoulder holster in both hands; one corner of his mouth quirked up, “C’mon, doll, be a good girl for me.” He smirked at her, and she glared at him, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Hand it over, Barnes.”
“Turn around.”
“Hand it over.”
“Turn around.”
She stared him down.
“I can do this all day. You’re the one who has someone that’s going to notice you’re gone soon,” he pointed out, and Darcy cursed him in her head. He was right, and she hated him even more for it.
“You’re a dick,” she told him as she turned, holding out her arms. She expected him to just help her into it and be gone; another power game won.
Instead, after it was settled on her shoulders, he pressed up against her back until she could feel the heat of him down the line of her body, even through two layers of clothing. His arms wrapped around her middle, one forearm snaking up to rest between her breasts along the length of her sternum. He put his mouth right up against her ear. “If I catch you giving your lunch rations to those kids again, I’m going to bend you over my knee and spank you so hard you won’t be able to sit down for a week. Do you understand me, Lewis?” His voice was low and dangerous, and a shiver raced down her spine.
He froze, and she cursed in her head as he made a considering noise in the back of his throat. “Or maybe that’s not the threat I thought it was?” he asked curiously; the hand pressed to her sternum was suddenly much heavier and sliding south, his breath wetter at her ear. “Well, that’s something we should talk about later,” he whispered, still in that same dark, rough tone. Darcy bit her lip to contain her whine, but she had no doubt he could smell the mess still leaking out from between her legs; stupid fucking super soldier bullshit.
“We don’t talk,” she got out between clenched teeth.
“I’d talk about that,” he said.
“I have to go,” she told him. She really did. Tony was a drunk, but even he would have noticed her absence by now.
“You have to stop giving away your food,” Bucky repeated, and the hand sliding down her front stopped over her stomach and splayed out. “You’re no good to anyone if you’re wasting away. You understand me?”
“Go to hell,” she snapped as she tore away from him. He let her go. There was no way she could get out of his grip if he didn’t want her to.
“We’re all already there, sweetheart.”
“Don’t I know it,” she muttered as she stalked away from him. She knew he’d wait a minute or two and then follow. That’s what they always did, not that they were actually fooling anyone.
Still inside the walls but set a hundred feet into a sparse clump of trees, the utility building was on the farthest eastern edge of the Camp. Darcy moved through the trees on silent feet; she’d learned how to be quiet in the forest over the last two years. She’d also learned to use the SIG handgun and knife strapped to her chest by her holster. She’d learned a lot.
Two years — Two years since news broke of a new virus spreading across the globe. Two years since the world ended in what felt like a matter of days. Two years since soldiers showed up in Jane’s lab in Stark Tower to evacuate them to safety.
It had been too late, of course.
It had been too late, long before any of them had even known there was something to be worried about. They’d pieced it together in the weeks after that first wave in New York. When they were running scared and the government was still trying desperately to hold things together as it became apparent the point of no return was already miles behind them.
It was Janet Van Dyne. Something to do with the quantum realm and how viruses mutated there or molecules moved — Tony had explained it a dozen times, but Darcy usually zoned out. She’d picked up the important bits, though.
Janet picked up a mutated virus in the quantum realm and came back wrong; she bit Hank, and Hank bit his daughter, Hope.
And it began.
The spread was slow at first.
Hank and Hope had been running their experiments in a secure base at a black site. It had all been contained, away from population centers. The government tried to keep it under control. Sam always went on and on about how he would never understand why the people in charge didn’t just put bullets in the heads of all three things — because they weren’t people — not after they died and turned. No one was a person after they turned.
Bucky told her once it was because the minute Janet Van Dyne arrived in a government facility as something that had never been seen before, she became a scientific novelty. Bucky said he’d been a scientific novelty once, too, and governments didn’t just put down a novelty. They studied them. Unfortunately, the Van Dyne family eventually turned on their captors.
By the time the virus breached the black site and reached the nearby town, it was already too late to stop it. From there, single cases started popping up on the outskirts of bigger cities. A man bitten but not yet dead and turned got on a plane to South America. Another to London. If a person wasn’t bitten fatally, it could take up to 14 hours to die and turn into one of the walking dead. Long enough for someone to get almost anywhere on Earth under their own power. One infected in a population center full of people who didn’t know what they were dealing with could bite a hundred before it was destroyed in those early days.
By the time the virus was on the news, countries were already starting to close their borders, and the more anxious suburban moms had bought out the local bottled water, bread, and peanut butter stock. Even then, most people were still going about their daily lives. No one was panicking yet. The more paranoid were wearing masks on the subway out of an abundance of caution.
The world really did end with a whimper.
The Wave — that’s what it came to be called, at least in the US — when it finally came was fast and overwhelming. A critical mass of infected had been reached, and it set off a chain reaction that sent the country into chaos over the course of a few days. Manhattan went down in a matter of hours. Followed by DC, then Los Angeles, and Chicago.
A rabies variant, the CDC claimed.
Zombies, the survivors screamed.
The US government was one of the last to fall, six weeks after the first Wave. The Germans and the Russians kept broadcasting the longest, almost twelve weeks, but they eventually, went silent, too.
And now it was just this.
The camps. The scavengers. The families. The bands of survivors who were barely eking out a life two years later among the living dead.
Darcy emerged from the shade of the trees, and the rest of their Camp spread out before her. Stretching the length of almost three football fields and entirely enclosed with metal walls over 12 feet tall, it was an impressive place by today’s standards. Not that standards were high anymore.
It was mid-afternoon, and most of the Camp’s 57 occupants were busy with their work details. Darcy could see a crew in the garden weeding and another feeding the chickens near the coop at the far end of the enclosure. A couple of the guys were working in the vehicle maintenance area near the gate, and Wanda was leading a building team on repairs to one of the cabins. Darcy started toward Tony’s garage Workshop set near the middle of Camp behind the main two-story building they all called the “Big House.”
Tony’s Workshop was one of the few buildings that had been on the property when they found it. The Camp had previously been a YMCA summer camp; the two-story Big House, a couple of the cabins, the utility building, and the garage that was now the Workshop had all already existed. Over the last year and a half, they’d added more cabins, extra outbuildings, some shelters, the gardens, the chicken coop, and another barn for the goats and their two horses and one cow. They’d also added the wall.
Honestly, Darcy wasn’t sure how they could have gotten by without a super soldier and Wanda’s powers in those early months. Construction was much easier when someone could just levitate the roof into place or hold the beam up with one hand. She had no idea how groups without enhanced individuals were surviving. She didn’t want to know.
She nodded to Audrey and Caroline as she passed the garden and dodged around Aiden and his little sister Mia, who were engaged in what seemed to be a very intense game of tag in the main field, and pushed up the rolldown door to the Workshop. “Tony, I’m back. Did you eat your lunch?”
The only reply was the sharp crackle of the welding torch. She let the rolldown door drop with a bang and moved deeper into the Workshop, dodging around tables piled high with collected junk, and accumulated wires and odds and ends. Tony Stark had become a pack rat at the end of the world. She found him in the back corner, hunched over his favorite workbench, mask on, the blue glow of the torch blinding.
“Tony!” No response. “TONY!” Nothing. She waited until he’d lifted the torch away from his project and kicked at his stool; he jerked back, spinning on his seat, then pushed the face shield up.
“You’re back.”
“I’m back,” she agreed. “Did you eat your lunch?”
“There was lunch?” To his credit, Tony sounded more interested than usual.
“Yes, there was lunch. I told you there was lunch before I left.” She spun, moving her way back through the chaos to the table where she left the plate, and frowned when all she found was a lug wrench in its place. She held up the wrench. “Tony, there is a wrench where I left your lunch.”
“Ah, I was going to work on that thing with the bolts,” he said, and she heard the torch start back up.
“Thing with the bolts,” she muttered to herself. “Thing with the bolts? The water heater?” she shouted.
“Yeah!” Tony shouted back.
“Okay.” She carried the wrench to the other side of the room where the beat-up water heater was waiting for repairs, and sure enough, the plate with the boiled potatoes, cut-up chicken, and green peppers was sitting next to a collection of screwdrivers and a handful of twisted wires. “I’m going to pretend I don’t see a parallel here,” she whispered, thinking of Bucky’s point about her own need to eat from only minutes before as she grabbed the plate and moved back toward Tony.
She turned off the gas to the torch this time to prevent distractions and put the plate down on the table next to his elbow. “Eat,” she told him.
“I was busy.”
“Eat.”
“I’m making a thing for Sara Bell.”
“What could Sara Bell possibly need you to make her?” Darcy asked, eyeing the hunk of metal on his workbench curiously.
“A rake,” Tony said blandly.
“A rake?”
“Yes, I hold several Ph. Ds, and I graduated from MIT at age 15, but now I make rakes in a garage in upstate New York.” He bit into a piece of chicken. He was eating with his hands, and he hadn’t bothered to take off his welding gloves first. Darcy figured it was better than nothing.
“Well, we can’t win them all,” she said with a shrug. “Is it going to be a good rake, at least?”
“Not really, no,” Tony said, “I’m not actually that invested, so I just kind of stuck tines perpendicular to a strip of metal and figured that counted.”
“Valid.”
“How was your lunchtime fuck?” he asked casually, and she choked on spit.
“Absolutely none of your business,” she told him cooly.
“He’s more than triple your age, Darcy. If you wanted an older man, you should have said something.” Tony leered at her, and she rolled her eyes.
“You’re the worst. Finish your lunch.” She snagged one of his chunks of potato, chewing it slowly.
“You going to work on the water heater?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’ll try to get it done this afternoon.”
“We’re basically tradespeople, Lewis. Eight masters degrees between us, and we’re making household goods.” Tony ate the last piece of chicken and reached out to turn the gas for the torch back on.
“It is what it is, Stark.”
“I know. I know.”
The torch crackled back to life, and she grabbed the wrench and got to work.
—
She couldn’t sleep. She rolled over to find a comfortable position on her narrow bunk, punching at her shitty pillow. Caroline was snoring on the other side of the cabin like a fucking freight train, and it was not helping with Darcy’s lack of zen. She flipped the pillow and let out a huff when she found the other side of it just as hot and uncomfortable as the last. It was useless.
Kicking off her blankets, she quietly stepped into her boots and grabbed her holster from the hook by the bed. She stopped short when she saw Wanda’s eyes shining from across the narrow aisle in the dim ambient light coming through the curtained cabin window. “Go to sleep,” Darcy whispered.
“Where are you going?” Wanda whispered back, already starting to shove her own blankets away. Like Darcy, she’d never stopped sleeping in her clothes; some habits from before the Camp were hard to break.
She took the half step needed to crouch down by Wanda’s bunk so they didn’t wake anyone else. “I can’t sleep,” she whispered. “I was going to go for a walk.”
“A walk or a walk?” Wanda asked, her eyebrows wiggling suggestively on the second word to make her meaning clear, and Darcy rolled her eyes.
“Is everyone aware of my business?” she hissed, scanning the other bunks to make sure the other five women in the cabin were sleeping. Caroline was still snoring loudly above them.
“Yes,” Wanda deadpanned. “I’m just glad it’s not Tony.”
“Gross.” She made a face, and Wanda smirked. “Okay, I’m out.” Darcy pushed to her feet. “A walk,” she repeated firmly, and Wanda grinned, her teeth a slash of white in the dark.
“Have fun,” she whispered. Darcy waved her off and padded across the room on silent feet, avoiding the loose floorboard by the door designed to creak if someone uninformed tried to enter. She crept out and breathed deeply as the cool night air washed over her.
Despite what she’d told Wanda, she probably could go find Bucky if she wanted to. He took watch most nights since he didn’t need as much sleep as an unenhanced person. She looked toward the gate, where she could just make out two figures standing guard, silhouetted against the red lights she and Tony had rigged to come on after dark to preserve night vision.
Her stomach reminded her that she’d ignored Bucky’s orders and snuck half her dinner to seven-year-old Clara Martinez when no one was looking. A walk probably wasn’t going to cut it on the distraction scale tonight; she’d need activity to keep her occupied, so she turned toward the Workshop, already thinking of the water heater she’d left half-deconstructed and ready to be cleaned and put back together. She still needed to figure out which wire had a short in it. Technically, Tony slept in the Workshop, but he’d be drunk by now, and he could sleep through anything.
She was halfway there, walking along the buried line of the power cables that led to the utility shed, when she heard it: the low sound of voices coming from the trees to her left. There was no reason for someone to be in the narrow strip of woods that bordered the wall inside the Camp this late. Hell, there was no reason for anyone but the watch to be that close to the wall this late.
She pulled her knife and turned into the treeline, moving on quiet feet through the underbrush toward the sound. The voices got clearer as she got closer, two people talking over a soft banging sound. She moved through the last clump of trees and stopped short as she took in the sight in front of her.
Alexandra Robinson and Hunter Wright were sitting on top of the wall, their backs to the camp, legs dangling over the outside edge. Hunter had his arm around Alexandra’s shoulders, and Darcy stared at them in shock, her mind trying to process the idea of this being some kind of lover’s retreat.
Then she heard the low, hollow moaning of the dead. And her heart stopped.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” she shouted, and maybe if she’d thought it through, she would have considered that it would startle them, but she was so furious about the risk they were taking that the consequences slipped her mind.
They both jumped, Alexandra yelped, Hunter made an aborted turn to the side, Alexandra shifted the wrong way, and they knocked into each other. Alexandra screamed as she overbalanced; Hunter reached for her, catching at her wrists and then failing to hold on when he couldn’t get his balance on the narrow ledge on top of the wall.
Darcy felt like she was watching it in slow motion, and she was already reaching for the knotted rope the teens had used to climb the wall before her brain even fully registered that Alexandra had gone over the far side.
“Allie!” Hunter yelled, one leg slung over the side like he was going to jump after her.
“Don’t you dare!” Darcy yelled as she hauled herself up, her feet planted on the metal of the wall, arms straining on the rope. “Can you see her?”
“I’m here,” Alexandra called from the other side.
“There’s biters.” Hunter was panicked, his voice shaky as he leaned over the wall to stare down the other side.
“If you go over that wall, I will fucking end you,” Darcy threatened, and she enjoyed that her reputation around the camp because of her position with what was left of the Avengers got Hunter’s attention. “Come down this side. Run and get Barnes. Go!”
“I have to help her,” Hunter wavered, his eyes still locked on Alexandra on the other side.
“Go!” Darcy snapped as she hauled herself up onto the narrow ledge. Hunter finally went, sliding off to dangle from his hands on the camp side of the wall before dropping to the ground. He landed in a heap, then leapt to his feet, sprinting off toward the gate.
Darcy looked down into the woods outside the Camp. Alexandra had her back pressed to the wall, knife out, but there were four dead, slowly stumbling toward her out of the dark. The low moans they were making would call more soon enough. “You good, Allie?” Darcy asked.
“I’ve been better,” she said, her voice shaking.
“If I got this rope down on your side, could you pull yourself up?”
“I think I broke my arm,” she said, her voice shaky, and Darcy could see she was cradling her left arm to her chest.
“That’s okay.” Darcy thought fast. If Hunter went for help, they’d be here in minutes. The best option was to — well, the safest option was to do nothing until help arrived. She watched the dead stumble closer to Alexandra and knew that wasn’t going to be the option she picked. She hauled the heavy-knotted rope over the wall and dropped it down the outside. “I’m coming down.”
“We’re gonna die,” Alexandra whined as Darcy’s feet hit the ground next to her.
“Oh, probably,” she agreed dryly, her heart racing. She looked at the shaking 18-year-old girl next to her, then back to the four dead still stumbling toward them, and pulled her gun. Fuck the knife; this called for firepower. She braced her feet, pressed her back to the cold metal of the wall, lined up her first shot, and fired.
She dropped the first four dead with clean headshots before another three appeared close on the left, and she shifted to take aim at those, cursing when it took two shots to take one of them out. She’d used 8 of her 15 rounds, and she still had more coming at them through the trees. Alexandra was crying softly next to her.
“Do you have a gun?” she asked as she lined up her next shot.
“No,” Alexandra sniffled, and Darcy took out two more with clean headshots.
She was down to 5 rounds, but she counted 7 more dead moving toward them from the trees. Fuck. There was a banging noise from the other side of the wall. A muffled shout and then a grunt from above them. Darcy fired another shot, dropping a shuffling corpse just before a familiar back appeared between her and the rest of the threat.
Bucky landed on slightly bent knees, taking the 12-foot leap like it was a jump from his bunk. He had an M15 strapped to his back, but he reached for the twin knives tucked into crossed sheathes at his hips instead. He didn’t look back, just threw himself into the fray, charging forward without hesitation into the oncoming dead, knives flashing in the pale moonlight as he thrust them deep into rotting skulls.
Darcy didn’t waste the opportunity his arrival created. Immediately turning back to the wall, she looked up and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Sam Wilson peering over the top, a second rope in one hand, his eyes locked on them. He motioned to the knotted rope hanging by Darcy, a question in his eyes. “Her arm’s broken,” Darcy called up just loud enough to be heard over the fight Bucky was waging behind them, wary of attracting the attention of any wayward dead that might slip past Bucky’s defenses.
“Got it.” Sam nodded, already dropping the second rope down. Darcy quickly tied it around Alexandra’s waist, squeezing her shoulder in comfort.
“You’re okay,” she whispered to the younger girl. “Everything is fine.”
“They’ll throw us out,” she said through a muffled sob, and Darcy blinked.
“No one is going to throw you out. Jesus. If anyone tries, you come find me, you understand? Or Tony.” Alexandra nodded, but she looked terrified as Sam started to haul her up.
Darcy waited until Sam had hauled Alexandra halfway up the wall before grabbing the knotted rope and starting to pull herself up; the muscles in her arms screamed at the additional physical exertion. She was less than four feet from the top when she felt a weight tug on the rope below, and she panicked. Looking down, she found Bucky scaling trailing length behind her with impressive speed.
She tried to outpace him only to have him catch her; his arm went tight around her waist, and he hauled her the rest of the way up with him practically one-handed. She’d be impressed by the show of strength if she wasn’t so annoyed by the chauvinism. But he had her by a good eight inches and probably 80 pounds, so she didn’t have much choice in the matter as he dragged her over the top and back down the other side, finally releasing her when they were safely on the ground back inside Camp.
A crowd had gathered. Hunter was there, and unsurprisingly, the entire Robinson family; Alexandra’s father, Michael, her older sister Annalise, and her little brother Anthony were all huddled around her, while David, a former EMT, and what passed for the Camp doctor, took a look at her arm.
Wanda was also present, and she slammed bodily into Darcy the second Bucky released her. Darcy wrapped her arms around the other woman. “I’m fine,” she said into Wanda’s hair.
“That was not a walk,” Wanda scolded.
“Things got out of hand very quickly,” she admitted.
“I’ll say,” Wanda said as she pushed Darcy back to arm’s length. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, not a scratch,” she said, holding her arms out to prove it. She turned, intending to thank Bucky for coming to the rescue, only to find him already gone; she scanned the clearing, her eyes catching on his retreating back.
“He was very upset,” Wanda said softly.
“Sure seems like it,” she muttered. “Inconsolable even.” She rolled her eyes.
“No, Darcy, you don’t understand; he —”
“You went over the wall!” Tony chose that moment to arrive barefoot, a homemade flamethrower strapped to his back, his shirt buttoned wrong.
“Not by choice,” Darcy said, and then. “Where are your shoes?”
“Probably with my sanity. Why would you climb over the wall when we have a perfectly good gate?”
“Well, someone else fell over, so I was trying to be helpful.”
“Oh, so it was that pesky hero complex I keep trying to beat out of you?”
“I’m sorry, aren’t you Iron Man? Is Iron Man lecturing me about a hero complex?”
“Was. I was Iron Man. Now, I am not. I learned my lesson. Lewis, the benefits of having a mentor. The mentor in this situation being me—”
“Yes, I picked up on that subtle reference.”
“Hush! The benefit of having a mentor who has already made these mistakes is that you can learn from them. So, learn from my mistakes and stop doing hero nonsense.” Tony’s eyes scanned her from head to toe. “You’re good?”
“I’m good.”
“Maximoff, you’re good, too? I like you as well,” Tony added.
“I am also good, Tony,” Wanda said with infinite patience. “Although I agree with Darcy, you should be wearing shoes.
“Bah, shoes are for suckers. We should invent something better!”
“That’s the nightcap talking,” Darcy mumbled. “C’mon, old man. Time for bed.”
“But I’m up now,” Tony objected.
“Yes, but the sun isn’t.”
“I’m not really sure what that has to do with anything,” Tony said, but he let Darcy lead him away.
“I’ll bunk in the Workshop,” she called back to Wanda. “I’ll stop by the garden in the morning to see you.”
“Yes! Glad you’re not dead,” Wanda said.
“Me, too,” Darcy agreed.
“Me, too,” Tony said, and he tried to drop an arm around her shoulders, which Darcy dodged.
“Tony, no touching when you’re a human bomb.”
“Fair,” he agreed. “Totally fair.”
—
It took thirty minutes and a couple shots of the homebrewed swill hidden behind the back workbench to get Tony to sleep. Darcy had eyed the spare cot in the corner of the office she sometimes crashed on and then grabbed the bottle of moonshine, stolen one of Tony’s secret cigarettes, and snuck out to sit on the cold ground behind the Workshop. She’d smoked the cigarette and was now staring at the bottle of booze where it hung from two of her fingers between her bent legs.
“Fuck,” she whispered. She took a sip from the bottle and relished the harsh burn of the alcohol.
The still was one of the first things Tony built when they settled here, and Darcy supposed she should be glad he kept the drinking mostly under control. There were a few times he went on a bender and got absolutely shit-faced, but for the most part, he kept it to a controlled functioning alcoholic level. Sam used to bring up getting him to stop, but not since it became clear this wasn’t a short-term thing. That no rescue was coming.
They all had their coping mechanisms. They’d all had their losses. Tony’d lost Pepper and Happy during the first Wave in Manhattan, almost before they’d known what was going on. He’d watched them both die. He’d told her about it once, during a particularly bad night in the first few months when they’d still been on the road, constantly moving from place to place and eating whatever they could find. When it was just a dozen of them, and they had no idea what the next day would bring.
Sometimes she envied Tony the certainty of his loss. He knew Pepper and Happy were gone for good. He didn’t have to live with the what-ifs that plagued the rest of them. He got the clean break of true mourning. There was something almost rare about that these days.
Darcy had been with Jane and Erik the day New York fell. They’d been in Stark Tower. Jane had finally accepted a grant from Tony to work out of one of the labs, and Darcy wasn’t going to turn down the tuition reimbursement program Stark Industries provided while she was trying to work on her Ph. D.
They’d all been watching the news, tracking the new virus everyone was talking about, but real info was still scarce on the ground. It had been a normal day. Darcy had taken the subway into work, and she’d made a joke to Jane about the woman next to her wearing a mask to prevent a virus the CDC said was absolutely not airborne.
So when everything had gone to shit, and armed soldiers in full hazmat gear had shown up to evacuate the lab, it’d been terrifying. It’d also been too late — god, it was never not too late in those early days — things went wrong almost immediately. The dead were already inside the Tower. They’d all gotten separated, and Darcy had been forced to try and find another way out on her own.
That’s when she’d run into Bucky and Sam on the Tower stairs; they were looking for their own teammates. They’d taken her under their protection without question. They’d collected Wanda two floors down. Then found Ian Boothby cluelessly trying to use his badge a few floors after that.
They didn’t find Jane or Erik. They also didn’t find Steve, Nat, Clint, or Bruce.
They found Tony, wearing half an Iron Man suit, covered in blood, shooting his way through a dozen dead to try and get to an armored truck in the parking garage. They’d fled the city in defeat a few hours later.
Those had been their first losses—the missing. They didn’t talk about them. There were too many confirmed dead after them, and it was too hard not to know.
Darcy took another burning gulp from the bottle and raised her head to stare out at the dark night. She squinted at a glint of movement in the distance and then scrambled to her feet, dropping the bottle as the shape in the dark took form, Bucky materializing from the gloom only thirty paces away, looking furious.
“What are you—” she didn’t get to finish before he was on her. He wrapped one massive hand around the top of her arm and started to drag her away from the Workshop. She dug in her heels, but it didn’t matter. “Where are you—” She cut off in surprise as he stopped walking and swept her up in one strong move, swinging her over his shoulder like she was nothing.
“Barnes, I swear to god,” she hissed into his back, her fingers twisting in his sweater above his ever-present double weapons belts. He didn’t say anything; just kept walking toward the north side of the camp. Darcy could hear the river as they got closer to the wall and the water treatment set up.
He was taking her to the Water Shed, the small outbuilding that housed all the water pumps and electrical for their water treatment system. It had taken her and Tony two months to build it all, and during that time, Tony had often slept in the Water Shed, so there was still a cot left between the pipes. It wasn’t Darcy’s favorite spot, but she and Bucky had used it before to meet up and fuck. If he thought she was going to sleep with him after the night she’d had, he had another thing coming.
Bucky shoved the door to the building open with one hand, kicking it closed behind him. The low hum of the pumps was a soft, droning background noise as he set her on her feet. “There is no way I’m fucking you right now,” she snapped.
He let out a noncommital grunt and herded her against the far wall until her back was pressed to the cold cinderblock. She glared at him, arms crossed over her chest. He stared back, his eyes half-hidden in shadow from the single hanging bulb that lit the room. He reached for her, and she ducked away from his hand. Bucky scowled. “Hold still,” he growled, and his hands came back, both of them this time, reaching for her hips.
“What are you doing?” she yelped as his fingers caught in the bottom of her hoodie, pulling it and her holster off and over her head with brute force, heedless of her struggle to keep both in place covering her body. She was left panting and furious in just her long-sleeved t-shirt, her hair wild around her face. “What the fuck, Barnes?” she snapped, but he wasn’t done. Crowding her against the wall with a huff, his hands found the bottom of her shirt, and he tugged at it, trying to rip it off as well.
She shoved at him, slamming both her palms against his chest, shoving at him. “Stop it, you asshole! What the hell, Barnes!” She shoved him again, and the hands trying to pull her shirt up switched to clutching at her hips instead. His forehead dropped to her shoulder in defeat, and she could feel his ragged breath against her neck.
“Were you bit?” he asked, his voice low and rough. “Scratched?”
She froze. Then she took a slow, shaky breath. His hands slid up her back, fingers spreading wide over the thin cotton of her t-shirt. “You having a bad night, Barnes?” she asked.
He scoffed. “You went over the goddamned wall, Lewis,” he replied, and it sounded like he barely got the words out between clenched teeth.
“She would have died,” Darcy whispered, and she gave in, channeling her fingers through his shaggy hair and then sliding them down his warm neck.
“You could have died,” Bucky countered, and he lifted his head to look her in the eye. “Were you bit?”
She took a deep breath. “None of them touched me,” she said quietly, “None of them got within six feet of me.” His shoulders slumped, and he pulled her tighter to his chest. “You could have asked instead of dragging me in here and trying to force me out of my clothes,” she said dryly.
He smirked, but it was shaky like he was trying to fake his way into their normal routine. “More fun my way.”
“You’re a jackass.”
“I know.”
“Did you get bit?” she asked, her eyes scanning what skin she could see, but he was already shaking his head.
“No, they were clumsy. Old ones.” He narrowed his eyes. “You went over the wall,” he repeated.
“She would have died.” She tried to put extra emphasis on her own repetition so it would sink in this time.
“You should have come and gotten me.”
“By which point she would have been dead.”
Bucky growled in frustration, shoving away from her hard enough that she landed against the wall with a smack. “And you would have been fucking safe!” he shouted.
“And she would have been fucking dead!” she shouted back.
“Who the fuck cares! You would have been safe, and she shouldn’t have been making out on top of the wall to begin with.” Both hands tugged at his hair in frustration.
“Oh! You know you don’t mean that!”
“I absolutely mean it!”
“Yeah, you’d never say that shit to her father. Go on, go wake up Michael Robinson, the man who helped you build fucking cabin three, and tell him his daughter deserved to die because she was making out with her boyfriend tonight!” she yelled.
“There’s no room for idiocy in this world, Lewis! Not anymore. Just like there’s no room for bravery or attachments or anything else,” he snapped. “You’re smart, and you live. You’re dumb, and you die.”
“Well, that’s a fucking sad way to live.”
“Better than slowly starving to death like you. That’s right,” he snapped, a finger pointed in her face when she opened her mouth to object, “I saw you give half your dinner to those fucking kids again. Don’t think I forgot.”
“There is no universe in which you spank me, Barnes. I’m not a child.”
“You’re sure acting like one, making stupid decisions all over the place.”
“I’m trying to take care of people. This is a community.”
“This is basically a holding tank for zombie snacks, and we both know it,” he snarled.
Her mouth opened and then closed in shock; the only sound was the continued drum of the water pumps and her panting breath. She stared at him with wide eyes. “You’re having a bad night,” she said finally. “You didn’t mean that.”
He ran a rough hand down his face and paced across the small room to throw himself on the narrow cot. “What if I did?” he asked, his eyes locked on hers.
“We don’t do this,” she said sharply, and his eyes narrowed.
“Don’t do what?”
“We,” she waved a finger back and forth between them, “don’t have emotional conversations. We shout at each other in public and then have dirty, physically fulfilling sex in secret. That’s been the deal from the beginning.”
“And you like that?”
She groaned in frustration. “Yes,” she lied.
He stared at her, and she was positive he knew she was full of shit. He cocked his head to the side, and she felt stripped bare under his bright blue gaze. “Get out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Get out.”
“You’re the one who dragged me in here.”
“Yep, and now I’m asking you to get the fuck out.”
She snatched her hoodie and holster off the ground. “You’re a jackass,” she snapped as she stalked past him toward the door.
“I’m aware,” he muttered, but she was already gone.
