Written for the lovely cardeakelsey as part of the 2015 Darcyland Secret Santa Exchange. As per the request, it's a heaping helping of Steve/Bucky/Darcy of the "first words reveal your destined soulmate" flavor.

Paradigm Shift

By TheFictionFairy

The first time Darcy met one of her soulmates, she almost completely missed it. She maintained that this was not her fault, and could've happened to anybody.

Darcy was one of the millions of unfortunate people who had at least one soulmark that was depressingly commonplace. She wasn't sure how everyone else dealt with have something generic and frequent like "Hello" or "Nice to meet you" without going nuts. She'd heard her words – a clipped "Excuse me" scrawled across the inside of her left wrist – said to her by strangers nearly every day of her life, and the novelty of potentially finding one of her soulmates every time it was said had worn off somewhere around seventh grade. After years of letdowns, she was practically deaf to the phrase.

Eventually she'd just had to concede that, unlike with "I'm not who you think I am" (flowing in a cascade down the outside of her right calf), she was just going to have to count on "Excuse me" to recognize her by her response. She'd gone through a few over the years – "You didn't say please!" had been a favorite as a kid – before finally giving up the ever-changing script and just blurting out whatever was on her mind.

Darcy was just eternally grateful she hadn't met her soulmate in college. She didn't think anyone – even a soulmate – could forgive her if she'd stuck them with a soulmark like "Professor Hoffman is a dick" right across the forehead.

Besides, it wasn't like her life was stalled out while she waited to find her soulmates. She had places to go, people to see, alien invasions to thwart! And, because he was a total bro, Thor always made sure she and Jane were on the guest list to whatever ridiculous, over the top, totally awesome party Tony Stark was throwing that month.

All in all, Darcy felt, it was completely understandable that a lifetime of hearing "Excuse me," combined with just a little too much of the very nice booze, meant that she almost completely missed that one of her soulmates was Captain freaking America.

The party was nearly over, lights dim but music still reverberating through her bones. She had ditched her pinching heels somewhere near the ice sculpture (Iron Man, of course, because Tony Stark didn't know the definition of the word "subtle"), and the world was swaying pleasantly around her to the beat of the music. Darcy was quite pleased with herself – tonight she'd finally managed to snag dances with both Clint Barton and Tony Stark, tallying up her mental scorecard to three out of the six Avengers. She nearly missed Jane waving her over to where she and Thor stood talking to another party guest. Darcy grinned, hoping Thor was up for yet another twirl around the dance floor – the guy had some moves.

Jane met her on the outskirts of the group and, looking Darcy up and down, demanded, "Are you drunk?"

"Absolutely," Darcy replied, nodding proudly and not breaking stride until she stood beside Thor. "Hey big guy, wanna grab another before the dance floor dies?"

Thor broke off what he was saying to the hot muscular guy on his other side to smile down at her, eyes twinkling. "Darcy, have you met my friend Steve Rogers? I don't believe he's had a chance to dance yet." Thor turned to the hot muscular guy, who, upon closer inspection, Darcy recognized – partly from her history classes, partly from the news, and partly from stalking the Avengers on social media – as the star-spangled man with a plan himself. "Steve, this is my dear friend Darcy, who has made it her mission to claim a dance with every Avenger."

Darcy turned her grin to Captain America, trying to put as much flirt into it as she could while everything was slightly fuzzy. "Care to put me over half?"

Captain America went very still, eyes wide. Darcy began to question just how badly her words were slurring. She was still understandable, wasn't she? She searched his face and her eyes caught on his jaw, where a muscle jumped as it clenched. His gaze turned intense as he stared at her. Her smile faltered a little at the uncomfortable silence. "I've already gotten Stark and Hawkeye, and Thor of course, so you'd make four out of six. Not that I'm counting or anything, because that would just be lame," she babbled weakly as he continued to stare at her.

Darcy looked to Jane for an explanation, but the other woman just shrugged, her face mirroring Darcy's confused discomfort. Then she looked over to Thor for reassurance, only to find that he was watching Captain America with an uncharacteristic solemnity.

Suddenly Captain America's stillness was broken – he faltered back a step, tension in every line of his body. "Excuse me," he bit out to Darcy, turning to leave.

"Steve, perhaps—" began Thor.

"No, Thor," the Captain said sharply, snapping his gaze from Darcy to glare at the god. Darcy took a step back from the heat of it, despite it not being directed at her. The Captain jerked back in her direction, eyes flicking to her face only briefly before being quickly lowered to the floor. He turned sharply on his heel and stalked away.

The three of him stared after him in silence for a moment, the rhythmic vibrations of the music oddly stifled in their ears. Darcy felt almost ashamed of herself, like she had done something wrong, and didn't understand why. She hated that it sort of made her want to cry.

"What was that?" demanded Jane, voice tense and defensive on Darcy's behalf. Darcy loved her for it. She had to resist the urge to glomp on to the smaller woman – booze always did make her over-emotional.

"It appears," began Thor carefully, glancing between Darcy and Jane, "that Captain Rogers may have been unprepared for meeting his second heartmatch."

Jane gasped, but Darcy didn't immediately understand why they had both turned to stare at her. Captain America wasn't prepared to meet his heartmatch? …wait, wasn't "heartmatch" the word Asgardians used instead of "soulmate?" But he only talked to me, so that couldn't—

"Darcy, Steve Rogers is your soulmate?" asked Jane, voice full of the same intense energy that signaled the near-completion of a particularly tough equation.

Darcy blinked at the both of them. She tried to remember exactly what words had been exchanged. She drew a complete blank.

"Wait, what?"

Steve hadn't meant to be cruel, though he realized that was probably how it came across. But he didn't want another soulmate.

Before the shock of waking up from the ice in the wrong century had even begun to wear off, he'd been horrified to discover a new set of words marked on his skin: "Care to put me over half?" looping elegantly along the curve of his hip. Nothing like the slippery cascade of letters on his bicep ("You look like you got hit by a truck").

A new soulmate that had been born in the time after the crash.

Steve had stared at the new mark for hours in the mirror, running his thumb over his other words – Bucky's words – and trying to swallow the feeling of shame that came with the betrayal of Bucky's memory. Logically, he knew it had been decades, but it still felt fresh and raw.

And now, having met her – a gorgeous, smiling girl, a dear friend of a friend, so bouncy and carefree, and attractive – the thought of the words on his hip made him feel ill.

He packed his things, ignored Stark's complaining about his short visit and Thor's protests to contact the girl – Darcy – and got on the next plane back to D.C.

Steve threw himself back into service. Letters came for him, passed through SHIELD and neatly listing Darcy Lewis as the sender, always with a cheerful yellow post-it in what looked like Natasha's handwriting helpfully listing all the girl's contact information, but he didn't read them. He couldn't bring himself to throw them away, either. They sat in a neat, ever-growing stack, unread and accusing, on his shelf.

Instead, he did his job. Set up a routine. Tried to forget she existed. Tried to forget the past.

Two months later everything went to hell.

He didn't know what to do.

He left his target on the riverbank – injured but alive. He hadn't completed his mission. Hadn't wanted to.

Didn't understand why.

His target had claimed to know him. Claimed they were allies. Friends. Soulmates.

His target had told him that his words should be on his left arm. There was no way for him to corroborate the story himself. The arm was gone. Those words were gone.

"You should see the other guy," his target had claimed they read. He had no way of knowing. It didn't sound wrong. But it didn't sound familiar, either.

He knew about soulmarks. Knew that they appeared somewhere on the body when a soulmate was born, knew a person was born with them if their soulmate already existed. Knew that they could be used for identification. Knew the world average to be one to three soulmates per person. Knew that soulmates constituted potential weaknesses in targets.

Knew soulmarks could not be erased. Not cut off, burned through, or scarred over.

He knew he had a bandage on his thigh that he was forbidden to remove.

But he'd just done so many things that he was forbidden to do.

When he finally lost all his tails, slowed down, found a secure place, and removed the bandage. Saw the words. Noted they were still legible. Noted the scar tissue layered over them, as if someone had attempted to cut through, burn off, scar over them. Memorized them. Got redressed. Faltered over whether or not to reapply the bandage. Routine said yes – apply bandage without looking at words. Something else said no.

He did not cover the words with anything but clothing again.

And then he began to gather intelligence.

Darcy wasn't really surprised when Captain Rogers didn't answer any of her letters. It had been a longshot anyway – he clearly didn't want anything to do with her. Still, she just hoped he at least gave her credit for attempting to communicate through snail mail.

Before she had identified Steve Rogers as her soulmate in what she now privately (and sometimes publicly) referred to as The Incident, Darcy had been content to go through life without one. Sure, she had two marks, but some people didn't find their soulmates until old age. She had decided when she was young not to be one of those girls who put her life on hold until she found her "other half." Darcy was not, and had never been, a mere half.

And, to be honest, her life didn't change too much post-Incident. Darcy still worked with Jane, she still pursued her Poli-Sci degree (though now it was a master's instead of a bachelor's), and she still went out with friends and even went on a few dates. But if, occasionally, her mind would wonder, vaguely, what Steve Rogers was doing, she really couldn't be blamed. Despite its potential problematic connotations, society put a huge premium on the soulmate narrative. It was clearly all society's fault that Darcy wrote him roughly once a week. It was clearly her upbringing that should be blamed for the twinge of hurt that pinched in Darcy's chest every time he didn't contact her.

Until one day, he did.

She was in line at Starbucks, running late for work, when she received a text message, sent from an unknown number.

"SHIELD cannot be trusted. They'll use you to get to me. Run. –SR"

Darcy had panicked. She didn't know anything about running from a huge, near-omniscient organization, no matter how many spy movies she'd rented after her first brush with SHIELD's suited goons when they had nearly disappeared her boss. She'd gone to the nearest train station, taken as much cash as she could from an ATM, and bought a ticket to Canada with her credit card. Then she'd dumped her phone in a trash bin and gotten a taxi to the south side of town, paying cash. She'd hoofed it west as far as she could go until she was in a shitty part of town (which she hoped with all her might had fewer cameras around), and paid cash at a no-tell motel where she'd spent three days huddled in a dirty, smelly room with the blinds drawn, drinking tap water and eating what she'd hoarded from the vending machine, hoping with all her might that they really thought she was stupid enough to use the ticket bought with her credit card, hugging herself and rubbing her wrist raw as she watched the staticky TV news of what was happening in D.C.

It was a total shit show. By the end of it all, the whole world was upside-down, inside-out, and sideways, and despite the fact that her inner political scientist was practically drooling for a chance to get her hands on those files the Black Widow had made public, all Darcy really wanted was a good meal, a good sleep, and maybe a good cry.

A few days after she got back home and dealt with Jane's complete and utter nuclear meltdown (that tiny woman could get ridiculously aggressive when someone she loved was in danger or when information was being kept from her, and Darcy had checked both boxes – it had not been pretty), a letter was slid under her door. Darcy hadn't been home at the time, and the letter had no stamp or return address. She was suspicious about it being hand-delivered (she thought it was too small to be a bomb, but was anthrax still a thing?), but curiosity eventually won out.

"Dear Miss Lewis,

I'm sorry that my actions put you in danger, and I am glad to find that you are well. I do not know how to remedy the situation, as SHIELD requires a registration of all agent's soulmarks and was probably monitoring our communications. I hope that the necessary breach of privacy four days ago does not cause you too much difficulty.

I must also apologize for my earlier behavior. Please know that I believe you to be a genuinely lovely person, and that in any other circumstance I would have been very happy to discover we shared each other's words. As it stands, I am not in a place, personally or circumstantially, where pursuing a relationship of any kind between us is possible. I hope you can understand.

Best wishes,

Steve Rogers."

A part of Darcy was kind of impressed that she had garnered a personal Dear John letter from Captain America himself.

Her reactions came in four distinct waves. The first could pretty much be summed up with "ouch." She may or may not have cried because it was all just too much – she'd been put through the wringer in the last few days for an association with someone who didn't even want to associate with her. Steve had had it worse, Darcy knew he did, but she felt she was allowed to be a little selfish after fearing for her life for three sleepless days all because of someone who couldn't be bothered to care.

Then she was a righteously offended. It's not like she had gushed her whole heart out into her own letters, but at least they had been warmer and more personal than this letters-to-the-editor-style cardboard. She'd gotten form letters of rejection friendlier than this. He'd nearly gotten her killed from what she could tell, and he couldn't even bring himself to call them soulmates. She skimmed his wording again – "shared each other's words" – and snorted. And who was he to imply she couldn't take care of herself? Last she checked, she'd helped thwart two alien invasions, while he was still at one.

Darcy really, really needed to find some way to repay Jane for sitting through all her pacing and yelling without complaint.

The next day was full of paranoia as the idea of being in SHIELD's records – SHIELD's now very public records – as Captain America's soulmate hit her hard. Visions of being stalked by paparazzi (or possibly assassins, but thinking about that part brought back the sense memory of the smell of that motel room and she just couldn't deal with that right now) danced in her head as she frantically attempted to remove all her personal information from the obvious parts of internet – which was no small task, and would have been the most painful thing she'd done all year if she hadn't just been summarily rejected by her soulmate. By the time she declared herself done with it, she was both pretty sure that only someone with moderately advanced computer skills could find her information and certain that she needed to pass out from exhaustion.

The fourth and final wave took another week to hit. It snuck up on her, a tide rising in the back of her mind that she didn't notice until it had settled into her heart. She wasn't really angry at Steve. Well, she was, but not blindly. She was left without the instinctive wrathful backlash and left with an insatiable curiosity about why he might reject her without ever having really met her. Thor had mentioned she was a second soulmate – Steve was the first she had found, maybe the second was different? Considering his history, it had probably ended badly. They were almost certainly dead now. Was he still in mourning? Was it too soon?

Darcy didn't know. She didn't know him well enough to guess. Sure, Darcy, like every other American born in the last seventy years, knew all about Captain America – but she realized, morosely, that she really didn't know anything about Steve Rogers. But, despite the pinched look Erik and Jane got whenever they were reminded of Darcy's soft science background, it didn't mean she was a stranger to research. In fact, Darcy was very comfortable with this part of the process – researching history, cultural input, environmental factors, and contextualizing details in order to predict behavior. True, she had no idea what she even wanted to do with any insight into her wayward soulmate, but she knew she'd feel better once she had it.

Darcy went to Thor first for some personal insights, but all he could really do was confirm what many historians had been hotly debating for decades: that Bucky Barnes had indeed been Steve Rogers' soulmate. But that was all the new information he could really give her – apparently Steve Rogers was an intensely private person, and anyway, any other information Thor had was "not his to give, even to Steve's heartmatch." Darcy was torn between annoyance at his reticence and warm fuzzies at the demonstration of what a good friend the big guy was.

Given the events in D.C., that just raised far more questions than it answered. No wonder Steve was being so emotionally constipated. Darcy's pretty sure that if she were in his position she'd have run away screaming a long time ago.

So Darcy was left to puzzle out the man from the outside in. Luckily she was not lacking for resources – Captain America had been a cultural phenomenon even in his own day, and a very popular topic for historians since. Darcy threw herself into research more intensely than she ever had with any other topic.

This was how Darcy found herself in Washington D.C. – the nerve center of most of her problems in the last month – vising a museum exhibit about her soulmate in order to learn more about him. It was so backwards she had the urge to laugh.

It was a good exhibit, she had to admit. Informative, exhaustive, interactive, and very popular judging from the crowds. It had been open for several months and yet she'd still had to wait in an aggravatingly long line to get in. Despite the attempt at population control and the air conditioning running at full blast, it was still much warmer inside the exhibit hall than was comfortable, with people crowding and knocking into each other somewhat regularly.

Halfway through the exhibit, and Darcy had gotten so many "Excuse me"s from strangers that she really had started to laugh. It was a little bit bitter and a little bit hysterical, but the whole thing was just so ridiculously ironic that she couldn't help herself.

That's what she was doing, head ducked to muffle the sound of swallowed giggles, when she bumped into another person. Hard. So hard Darcy practically bounced off of him, stumbling a few steps back and almost tripping over a child running behind her. Attention jarred from the wall display he had been studying, he whipped toward her, quick as a striking snake, and grabbed her arm before she could over-balance.

Darcy's eyes locked onto his face. Flicked to the blown-up picture on the wall behind him. Back to him, trying to process what she was seeing. Darcy's eyes widened as it clicked into place. The man noticed her recognition and went very still, quiet panic on his face as his eyes darted back and forth, searching for an exit.

Someone bumped into Darcy from behind, and sent her already off-balance form stumbling forward into the arms of James Buchanan Barnes, not-so-dead soulmate of one Steven Grant Rogers.

"Excuse me," muttered the woman behind her, already moving on to chase her rampaging children.

Darcy closed her eyes for a moment and gave a pained groan. Then she looked Barnes dead in the eye, and with all the resignation that her situation warranted, solemnly proclaimed: "My life is a cosmic joke."

Steve was only a few days home from the hospital when the call came. Natasha had been with him at the time (he suspected that she and Sam had set up some sort of rotating watch schedule so that he would actually be forced to stay home and recuperate instead of running off to search in the night, which foiled his initial plan), and it was her phone that rang. Steve's head had whipped in her direction – still jumpy from the events of the past few weeks – but he'd loosened up when he saw her glance at the caller ID and relax back into her curled position, bare feet tucked under hear as she leaned sideways onto the back of his couch. He muted the television show they'd been watching as she answered.

Steve couldn't hear exactly what was said on the other line, but the deep timbre of the enthusiastic voice and Natasha's casual replies could only mean it was Thor. After a few exchanged pleasantries, Thor's voice went quieter and Natasha's eyes flicked over to Steve. She hummed thoughtfully as they narrowed, clearly evaluating him. He tried to pretend he was watching the show instead of eavesdropping, but he knew he didn't fool her for a second.

"Are you sure? He kept saying no when I tried to convince him." Natasha said with a playful smirk as she repositioned herself, stretching her legs out into Steve's lap. Her toenails were painted a deep maroon, and Steve could just catch sight of the edge of a looping soulmark peeking out from under the cuff of her jeans at the ankle; it appeared to be layered over a shining pink-white scar. Thor's muffled voice replied something solemnly on the other end of the line. Natasha's smirk stayed in place, but it changed somehow. Became… not stiff, but more… deliberate, almost. Careful. Purposeful. Steve wasn't sure what that meant. Frankly he was just kind of amazed he'd been able to start picking up on Natasha's moods at all. And grateful that she was letting him.

Then the voice on the other end of the line changed – something low and feminine, speaking very fast. Natasha gave up the pretense of playfulness and let her smile drop, mouth pulling tight into a serious line and brows drawing down into a delicate furrow. Steve was now officially worried. Was Natasha in some new kind of trouble? Another government hearing? Were they involving the other Avengers?

"It's for you," Natasha said, suddenly thrusting the cell phone into his hands. He fumbled it for a second in surprise.

"Uh, Rogers here?"

"Um. Hi. Please don't hang up, this is really important," began the voice. Steve took a breath to reply, but before he could he was hit with a rapid-fire flood of speech, high and stressed and desperate: "Listen I know you don't want to talk to me and I was cool with that – well, not really, but you know, no means no and all that and I was trying to be respectful and all – but this isn't about me anymore. Well it is, but not just about me. It's about me also, but it got a lot more complicated than I think any of us were expecting and anyway what I really really need you to do is meet up with me pretty much immediately because I don't think any of us really knows what to do but we need to do something and we need a plan and you're part of this and three heads are better than one so I need you to just – just please come." The woman on the phone paused for a single, deep breath.

"Um. This is Darcy by the way. Darcy Lewis? Your, um, you know."

Steve glanced, eyes wide and panicked and more than a little accusing, at Natasha, who just shrugged unapologetically. He moved to get up, but Natasha dug her ankles into his thigh, signaling for him to stay in place so she could listen in. Steve glared but didn't fight her on it.

He hunched over Natasha's feet, elbows on his knees, and worked his jaw for a moment, trying to figure out a way to get out of it without sounding like a total ass. He could feel the tension winding tighter every moment he delayed.

"Miss Lewis, I don't think–"

"No," Darcy burst out, voice firm. "No. You don't get to do this. You don't get to just – just run off and not talk to me after we exchanged words and then not even bother to give me an excuse for your shitty behavior and then ignore me for months and then just text me out of the blue saying my life is in danger because of you and then apologize in a fucking Dear John letter–" Darcy took a deep, shuddering gasp of air. The line went silent for a moment.

When Darcy began again, her voice was flat and controlled, only a slight tremble betraying her turmoil. "I have something very important to discuss with you, face to face. I am asking you, as your soulmate, to do this one thing for me. Please."

Steve swallowed. It was harder than he was expecting. He could feel Natasha's gaze burning into him.

He remembered what it felt like – waking up and realizing Bucky wasn't there.

"Okay."

It was Rogers' fault, according to the girl. She'd laughed so hard and so bitterly when told the story that tears had sparkled in her eyes. She'd already had one soulmate run away from her on first meeting, she explained, and she'd be damned if she went two for two. Even with the benefit of time to dull the panicked shock of the moment in the museum, he didn't see why it was funny.

He'd been at the Captain America exhibit, uncomfortable out in civilian clothes for the first time he could remember, crowd making him edgy despite his training, all the new information not even fully processed. Then she'd been in his arms and the words on his thigh had come out of her mouth and his mind had gone utterly blank.

He wasn't used to panic. The internal chaos unnerved him. Everything was usually so clear. Anticipation. Satisfaction. Frustration. Thrill. Rage. Those he understood. Confusion was rapidly becoming familiar. So was longing. And something else he couldn't name yet. But panic was still new.

People were still new.

"I'm not who you think I am," he'd muttered, bringing his hands up to wrap around her arms, trying to disengage from her without hurting her, without causing any more of a scene, ducking his head away from the giant image of himself on the wall that burned in his mind's eye.

She'd inhaled sharply – like sucking in a screech – and tangled her fingers into his jacket. Held on tight. Pulled herself closer.

"I know who you are," she'd whispered fiercely, face inches from his own. Her eyes bore into his – did not waver to the image on the wall. They were a hard gray in the harsh fluorescent lighting. He couldn't look away. "Do you?"

He'd swallowed, mouth dry, tongue clumsy. His hands tightened around her arms. He didn't know how to answer. His gaze flicked back up to the staring picture of James Buchanan Barnes, and when he looked back to the girl whatever she must have seen in his face made her eyes soften.

"Do you… know who I am, at least?" she asked, easing herself back a bit, but keeping her fists clenched tight on his clothing.

"I," he paused, assessing her. Cataloguing her casual clothing, unbalanced stance, lack of muscle definition. Not a threat. Not dangerous. Not like him.

But she also felt very solid. Real in a way that the rest of the world did not, right now.

"I know what you're supposed to be," he finally settled on, voice soft and uncertain. It sounded like a question even to him.

The girl bit her lip, face crumbling into a sort of helpless self-deprecation. "Well, it's a start?" she offered. "At least we don't have to figure it out alone?"

She still hadn't let go of his jacket.

He didn't think he wanted her to.

The first time Darcy found herself in a room with both of her soulmates, she tried not to miss a thing.

She didn't miss how Steve's face lit up with painful, reluctant hope when she called Bucky into the room. She didn't miss the way Bucky glanced at her for reassurance before stepping forward. She didn't miss Steve catching the look, or the thoughts flickering behind his eyes, or the slow realization of what it all might mean.

Darcy didn't miss the shining, naked wistfulness on Steve's face when he looked between the three of them. She didn't miss the uncertain, guarded longing on Bucky's as he looked at Steve, or the way Bucky's hand caught on the edge of her sleeve as he came to stand next to her. Or the fact that he tugged her forward along with him to go meet Steve.

And she promised herself she wouldn't let this – whatever this was – go.