Relationship: Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers/James "Bucky" Barnes

Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe

This fic was inspired by the assignment I received for the 'Going On Facebook Darcy Lewis Fic Exchange' on livejournal (although I didn't actually get it finished in time for the exchange).

Prompt: "I'm a huge sucker for Darcy in relationships. Especially a Darcy that is kind of hurting or isn't confident in herself /her abilities, even though we all know she's super smart. So I guess I'd like to see Darcy's self doubts sort of beaten down by someone who ends up being her significant other(s)." Thanks to Muse Dae for the prompt! I didn't do exactly this, but the fic is inspired by this, I guess :3

Extra points for: Coffee (particularly Starbucks), raspberries, JARVIS, Jane/Pepper/Natasha/Darcy hoemance (best friendship).

A note on my Bucky: This is a movie-verse fic, so his personality is based on the Bucky in the first Captain America movie (because the Winter Soldier sequel is still so painfully far away!). Obviously comic-verse canon applies in terms of how he got to the present day (if you'd like to know more about this don't hesitate to PM me, but all you need to know is that he's in the present day now too and he has a cybernetic arm), but I decided not to bog him down with too many "issues" about all that because I felt that Darcy and 1940s Bucky would have heaps of fun together and I wanted to take advantage of that dynamic. Maybe he has already worked through some stuff since reaching the 21st century, maybe he's repressing things and/or maybe Darcy brings out his pre-Winter Soldier self. Whatever the case, my Bucky isn't anywhere near as dark as the one you'll find in the comics (or, possibly, Captain America: the Winter Soldier, we'll have to wait and see!).

AN: I just want to say a massive thank you to fiducia for being such an amazing cheerleader for this fic. Now, let's get on with it!

"Skinny hazelnut latte, venti," Darcy recites when she gets to the front of the line.

"Coming right up." The barista accepts her handful of change with a kind smile. Darcy can't quite bring herself to smile back, but she's grateful for it all the same. 'Elizabeth,' the woman's name badge reads. Elizabeth is going to make coffee happen, and in Darcy's eyes that makes her a goddess.

Darcy tucks herself into a quiet corner of the crowded coffee shop to wait for her drink. The air is heavy with the soothing smell of freshly-ground coffee beans, and she inhales deeply. Her limbs are sluggish and her eyes gritty from lack of sleep—Jane's couch is exactly as uncomfortable as it looks. She's in dire need of caffeine, but a trip to Starbucks today was inevitable, regardless of her stimulant requirements.

Normally she gets her phone out while she waits, thumbing through Facebook or Twitter as she laments the fact that humanity is still yet to invent the replicator, and that it's going to take whole minutes for her order to be ready.

Today, she stares blindly at a scuffmark on the floor.

She's in no hurry this morning. Once she has her coffee, she'll have no choice but to walk the last block to Stark Tower. Her job with Jane is still as awesome as ever, but being at work means talking to people and pretending she isn't feeling wretched. It also means having to concentrate on the task at hand while trying to keep her personal problems crammed into a little box in the back of her mind.

JARVIS, Tony Stark's A.I., would have her back, at least. He's always happy to fulfil her odd requests. Maybe she could ask him to take Jane's messages for the day, and to let her know when anyone was approaching her desk so she could sneak away before they got there.

That still wouldn't completely negate the need for human interaction, but at least she'd have a massive coffee to hide behind for the next couple of hours. Darcy always makes her latte last as long as possible, taking little sips and lingering over it until the dregs at the bottom are barely even tepid. She's ordered the largest size, but that doesn't mean she won't be disappointed when it's finished.

A massive, over-sweetened coffee is her go-to whenever life is getting her down. She always orders it with skim milk, though she has no idea whether it actually makes much difference to the calorie count of the syrup-laden beverage. She hears her mother's voice in her head, regardless. 'Now dear, those hips are wide enough already, don't you think?'

Her mother is 900 miles away, but those words still dog her. On a good day, she crushes them under her heel and keeps walking, embracing her Marilyn Munroe curves, but today is more of a Roseanne Barr type of day. There's no way she's not having her goddamn coffee, though.

"Venti skinny hazelnut latte for Darcy!" shouts the other barista. It's the same lanky, bored-looking guy from yesterday, the one with dyed-black bangs that hang over one eye. He never smiles, apparently, but he makes a kick-ass latte.

She shuffles her way through the throng of patrons, mumbling, "Sorry," every time her bulky shoulder bag accidentally jostles someone.

When Darcy finally gets to the counter, she claims her drink, wrapping both hands possessively around the tall cardboard cup. She takes a sip straight away, then winces as the scalding liquid sears the tip of her tongue.

"Rookie mistake, Lewis. You know better than that," she mutters to herself.

The drone of peak hour traffic fills her ears as she steps outside into a stream of briefcases and blank expressions. With a sigh, she starts the trudge to Stark Tower.

In less than a week, her relationship with her two super hot roommates has graduated from perfectly platonic to totally screwed up, and she didn't even see it coming. She feels like her heart is being torn in half, and she doubts even JARVIS could formulate a solution to the mess she's in.

One week earlier...

"I just had an awesome idea," says Darcy, accepting another freshly washed dinner plate from Steve's sudsy hand and drying it with a dish towel. Technically, she doesn't have to help with the dishes tonight if she doesn't want to. She was the one who cooked, and according to the 'Steve Rogers' Guide to Apartment Sharing,' that grants her exemption from clean-up duty.

There is, however, the matter of the minor food fight that broke out during the preparation of said meal, which she possibly initiated (reports vary on that particular detail) and definitely perpetuated. Darcy and Bucky only adhere to the 'Steve Rogers' Guide to Apartment Sharing' about seventy percent of the time, anyway.

"Oh yeah?" says Bucky. He's down on one knee, sweeping up stray spirals of dry pasta with a dustpan and brush. "Is it as awesome as your idea to put a handful of pasta down my pants?" he asks drily.

"Even better," she replies breezily. As much as he might like to pretend, he never actually gets mad at her. "You should talk to Tony about replaceable hands for your cybernetic arm. You know, like, a dust buster attachment," she says, with a lazy smirk.

Steve doesn't take his eyes off the saucepan he's washing, but Darcy could swear his mouth twitches with amusement. Bucky just gives her the side eye.

"How long have the three of us been living together?" he asks.

"Six months," Steve supplies, setting the clean pot on the drying rack.

"And to think, we barely knew you at the start. Feels more like years." Bucky picks up one of the pieces of pasta and slides his gaze thoughtfully back and forth between it and Darcy, like he's contemplating pegging it at her head.

"No, dude, seriously, let's not start that again," Darcy says. "We'll be cleaning up for the rest of the night. On the other hand, if you had a dust buster attachment for your arm, you'd been done by now. See what I'm saying?" she says, spreading her hands like she's making perfect sense. "In fact, why stop there? Consider the possibilities. You could have a detachable waffle iron, a leaf blower—hey!" she cries as a pasta spiral bounces off her forehead.

For Darcy, the decision to move into the Upper East Side apartment had been one of finances and logistics. Even on a healthy SHIELD pay check, she couldn't afford to stay where she was, plus the commute was more painful than listening to Coulson talk about evacuation protocols. The place the boys had found is conveniently located between Stark Tower and SHIELD headquarters. She spends most of her time in the Tower, but she's sometimes required at SHIELD, and while Steve and Bucky are usually at headquarters, they often have business at Stark Tower too.

She'd wondered what she was getting herself into, moving in with the anachronism twins—she'd had serious concerns about the playing of big band music and the potential for complaints about 'kids these days'—but things had turned out better than she ever could have predicted. Darcy and Bucky get on like a house on fire, seeing as they're both capable of being outrageous flirts, and Steve does an admirable job of making sure the apartment doesn't descend into complete anarchy, while being surprisingly easy-going about their occasional shenanigans. Case in point, tonight's kitchen tomfoolery. By the end, Steve had been right in the thick of it, using a frypan as a shield and hurling pasta like nobody's business.

There's something indescribably awesome about seeing the proper, upstanding Captain Rogers being a bit of a doofus. It's her personal mission to coax him into their hijinks wherever possible. There's nothing wrong with being reserved, but it's never far from her mind that what Steve and Bucky do for a day job is pretty intense, and no matter how well adjusted they might seem, they've experienced some truly crazy shit in their lives. If she can give them the opportunity to blow off a little steam, it's the least she can do.

She gives herself triple points if she can actually get Steve to laugh out loud—because a LOL from Steve is almost as rare as Barton missing a target—but she suspects a good chunk of the credit belongs to Bucky. The presence of a childhood friend can be the catalyst for truly impressive levels of goofballery.

It might have started out as an arrangement of convenience, but these days it's like one of those TV friendships where the characters are super close and always joking around, and touching each other more than normal friends ever do. Darcy would normally roll her eyes at those shows and call the writers lying liars, because real life just isn't like that, except that now her life actually is like that, at least while she's inside the apartment.

The three of them still have disagreements, and it doesn't mean there aren't still things she'd discuss with Jane and Natasha and Pepper that she'd never discuss with the boys, but rather than just being roommates, these days Steve and Bucky are more like the Athos and Porthos to her Aramis.

She still thinks the TV shows are lying liars, though, because there's no way a friendship this awesome exists anywhere else in the world.

With the kitchen taken care of, Steve and Bucky go and change into their workout gear. By the time Darcy wanders into the living room with a book in one hand and a glass of chardonnay in the other, Steve is pushing the coffee table up against the wall as Bucky rolls out the sparring mat.

Darcy settles herself on the couch, well out of range of any flailing limbs, and opens her book as the boys begin to spar, something they do a couple of times a week. She's reading Jane Eyre for the one hundred and eleventieth time and, while it's one of her favourites, her gaze keeps straying from the page. It occurs to her that it's probably unfair, pitting Charlotte Bronte against two hot guys getting physical in the same room, and eventually she gives up, letting the book fall closed in her lap as she sips her wine and watches the live entertainment instead.

Both men move easily in each other's personal space, Steve neatly blocking Bucky's punches and dodging his kicks, then throwing in a few moves of his own, only to have them smoothly deflected.

As Bucky ducks and weaves, his black tank reveals glimpses of the seam where his cybernetic arm is sealed to his skin. She's used to the sight of it by now but, joking aside, she still thinks it's an impressive piece of technology. For all the Iron Man suit can do, it can't knit metal to muscles.

The intensity of the workout is picking up. Bucky has a light sheen of sweat on his chest, and Steve's too-tight white shirt is darker at the arm pits, the back sticking to his damp skin. Those shirts are the icing on the Steve Rogers cake as far as Darcy is concerned. He's already eighteen out of ten on the Ryan Seascrest scale of hotness, and the way those shirts do absolutely nothing to hide the play of every muscle underneath is practically pornographic.

Darcy can't begin to fathom why he wears his shirts so tight, though Bucky has a theory that maybe Steve just never quite got the hang of buying clothes for Captain America's body. It's as good an explanation as any. She has a list of snarky tight shirt comments as long as Thor's hair, but she's never used a single one, because if Steve ever got self-conscious and stopped wearing them, it would be a sad day for all mankind.

Bucky can't compare to Steve when it comes to height or bicep girth, but then no one can—except Thor, and he's not even human so that doesn't count—but Bucky is handsome in a rugged way that Steve has no hope of emulating. His dark hair falls over his forehead as he spars, and his stubble is long enough by this point in the day that it gives him a deliciously scruffy look. The apartment may be in a great location, but the views are its best feature.

It occurs to her briefly that maybe it's inappropriate to be ogling her roommates, but then she remembers that ogling hot guys is kind of her thing, and that she doesn't like to get bogged down by words like "appropriate."

Eventually, though, Darcy starts to get bored with sitting on the couch by herself. "Are you guys nearly done? There's TV that needs us to watch it," she says, swirling her wine in its glass.

They seem to be up to the 'take the other guy down by any means necessary' part of the workout. More hits are finding their mark as they really start to test each other, but there's still the odd friendly jibe flying back and forth between them.

"Five more minutes," Steve puffs. He only glances at Darcy for a fraction of a second, but Bucky takes advantage of that moment to hook his calf behind Steve's knee and swipe his leg out from under him. Steve keeps his grip on Bucky's arm and they both go down onto the mat with a substantial thwack, Bucky's full weight on top of Steve.

There was a time when Darcy would have cringed in sympathy and asked if they were okay. These days, she doesn't even flinch. To be honest, she's more worried about the structural integrity of the floorboards.

"That was a dirty play, Barnes," Steve chastises, but he's grinning. Bucky's grinning right back, already using his advantage to rain light-hearted blows down on Steve.

"And Rogers is down for the count!" Bucky says, like he's commentating a wrestling match. Steve is playing along, and the whole thing is quickly becoming a parody of itself. Just moments ago, Darcy was watching two super soldiers training in earnest; now she's looking at a couple of boys roughhousing on the floor.

She watches them with a smile, though the amusement is fast being replaced by something else. There's a pleasant curl in her stomach as she watches them on the floor together, biceps flexing, hands all over each other. They roll several times, one getting the upper hand and then the other, until they're completely off the mat.

Suddenly, everything goes still. Steve is on top of Bucky, using both hands to pin Bucky's wrists on either side of his head. Bucky's gone slack, but Steve's arms and shoulders are corded with tensed muscles. He still has a leg wrapped around one of Bucky's from the move he just used to flip them over. Their eyes are locked on each other and their breathing is rough. Darcy's breaths aren't exactly coming smooth either, and for a long moment no one moves.

Darcy wishes she could pull a Nightcrawler and teleport out of the room in a puff of smoke. Or without the smoke, that would be fine too. Not that she's not extremely keen to see what happens next, but the chances of this little "moment" playing out like she wants it to are already slim, and she suspects her presence in the room is only lowering the odds.

Steve and Bucky have been dancing around each other for months now. When they'd first moved in together, she and Bucky had flirted up such a storm, Darcy was sure it would lead to something. Eventually, she came to realise it was all just a bit of harmless fun. That was the night that, while Steve was away on a mission, she and Bucky had a few beers and he'd confided about his feelings for Steve.

Bucky and Steve had both known since their army days that there was something between them, but the times being what they were, they didn't dare do anything about it. In Darcy's opinion, there are still far too many redneck homophobes on the planet, but from Bucky's perspective, the world is more accepting than he ever imagined it could be, and he sees no reason they should have to keep holding their cards so close to the chest.

Unfortunately, trying to get Steve to talk about any of it is like pulling teeth. In the one conversation Bucky had managed to coax out of him, Steve hadn't denied his feelings, but he'd asked for more time to get used to the idea of a physical relationship, while admitting that he's still attracted to women. Darcy suspects this last part is probably one of their biggest stumbling blocks. It's much easier to put off taking the hard road when the easy one is still right in front of you.

Apparently, the conversation had started off really well, although Darcy had only been privy to its fiery conclusion, which she'd had no context for at the time. It was a few weeks after they'd all moved in together, and Darcy had come home from drinks with Jane, Pepper and Natasha to hear raised voices coming from Steve's room. She'd identified Steve's authoritative tone first.

"I'm in the public eye. I need to be careful—"

Bucky had cut him off. "Why would you give a fuck what they think?" To this day she'd never heard him sound as pissed off as he did that night. "They could give you all the money in this cashed-up world, all their modern miracles, and it wouldn't even come close to repaying you for the lives you've saved. You don't owe them a goddamn thing."

"You know damn well it's not that simple." The volume of Steve's voice had risen to match Bucky's.

"It's as simple as you want to make it. Tell me you don't deserve this," Bucky challenged.

"We don't always get what we deserve," Steve answered grimly.

By that point, Darcy had been running through her options. As much as she might be tempted to stay and eavesdrop, her mother had taught her better. The way she saw it, she had three choices. One, sneak off to her bedroom and let them continue their argument in private, two, wade right on in there and see if she could sort things out, or three, start banging around in the kitchen to alert them to the fact that they're no longer home alone. She'd just decided on option three when Steve came storming out of his room. His stride faltered when he saw her, the furrows in his brow growing even deeper.

"Ain't that the fuckin' truth," Bucky spat, following him out of the room, and then it was Bucky's turn to pull up short at the sight of her.

"Lover's quarrel?" Darcy said, in a feeble attempt to lighten the mood. On reflection, she's kind of surprised no one ever presented her with some sort of 'Foot in Mouth' award for that spectacular gaffe, not that she could have known at the time that she was saying the absolute worst thing possible.

Steve strode past her without a word, grabbing his keys and closing the front door firmly behind him. Even though his thunderous mood was practically rolling off him in waves, he still didn't slam the door.

Bucky showed no such restraint, and when he flung his bedroom door closed behind him, the force reverberated through the entire apartment. Darcy stood cringing in the deafening silence that followed. It had been hours before Steve returned, and the tension in the air was palpable for days afterwards.

That was a long time ago, and while there hasn't been another blow up like that since, Darcy's much better at smoothing the waters these days. She suspects her skills in that area are about to be called on again.

The silence stretches on, but even Darcy can feel the tension draining out of the moment. Steve glances back over his shoulder at her, the colour obvious in his cheeks, then looks away again quickly. He releases Bucky's wrists and stands up.

"Enough horsing around," he says, extending a hand and pulling Bucky to his feet. "I have a file I need to read." Then he runs away. More specifically, he heads to his room without making eye contact with either of them, but it's the same thing.

Bucky flops down on the couch next to Darcy as they hear Steve's bedroom door close. Bucky's hair is all mussed up, and he looks defeated in a way that has nothing to do with losing their little play-fight.

Darcy huffs out a sigh of commiseration. She scoots over, closing the gap between them and slipping an arm through his, hugging it to her side. "You know that was an improvement, right? He was having feeling-y feelings and he only freaked out a tiny bit," she says, emphasising the 'tiny' by holding up her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart.

"I know," Bucky agrees, sounding tired. He rubs his face with his hand and sighs.

"In fact," she says, "I bet he's not freaking out at all. Reading a file, my ass. Unless that's some old timey metaphor for jacking off?"

That earns her a grudging smile.

"I bet if I hadn't been here he totally would have made a move," she says, with more confidence than she feels.

"I don't know, doll. I'm not sure what it's going to take," he says, as he runs a hand over his hair in a slapdash attempt to tidy it. She releases his arm and combs her fingers deftly through the parts he's missed, and like a patient Labrador, he sits still and lets her do it.

"Such a shame you can't just get him drunk and have your way with him. I'm sure he'd come around if he knew what he was missing out on," she says, with an eyebrow waggle worthy of Tony Stark.

"You have a devious mind, Lewis," he says, which is hardly fair, because he's at least as devious as her.

"Seriously though, he seems so close to taking that final step, there's got to be something we can do to help him," she says. It's like some TV drama where her two favourite characters are in love but can never quite manage to hook up. Some days she just wants to shout, 'Sort your shit out and kiss already!'

"Well," Bucky drawls, "I have an idea on that front, but you're not going to like it."

"Oh? Try me," she says.

AN: If you find any errors please let me know, and if you have any interest in beta-ing this fic I'd love it if you could PM me, but my biggest hope is that people will read this and think "I can do better than that!" and write more of this OT3 :)