Road Trip (Witch!Darcy, Steve/Darcy)
Series: Bell, Book and Candle on AO3 (This would be Part II, after “Knowing”)
Posted first at my Dreamwidth (raptureofthemoon).
Darcy and Jane arrive in New York after the big battle, after the hush of grief leaking into acceptance has fallen over the rubble of the city. They arrive at what’s left of Stark Tower. They’re looking for Thor. What they find is an unexpected home.
Tony Stark seems to be on a mission to collect all the Avengers and those who might be Avengers adjacent. A leading astrophysicist and her flunky seem too good to pass up. There’s a whirlwind of meetings and that evening, over employment paperwork and takeout in their hotel room, Jane stares at Darcy over her carton of cashew chicken and says “Does this seem weird to you?”
“Compared to what?” Darcy asks.
They view the lab space the next morning. Its broken windows and dead electrical wires coiled like black snakes around the floor leave something to be desired. But when your city’s recently been invaded by aliens, Darcy supposes that’s to be expected.
Three weeks, is the timeline they’re given, for the lab to be inhabitable. Jane has contacts at the Steven’s Institute with space where she can work on some things in the meantime. Darcy gets the time off, with Jane’s blessing.
So she takes the savings she’s squirreled away and the portion of the sign-on bonus Jane insists she have, gets in her VW Beetle and cuts straight down from New York to New Orleans.
She spends several days wandering the French Quarter. She stuffs on beignets and café au lait in the mornings and spends the afternoons gathering ingredients for her pantry, swamp mud and graveyard dirt among them. Of course, there were swamps and graveyards in other states, but nothing with the same kind of energy as the old, moldering ruins in New Orleans.
From there, she cuts across the coast and wanders up into Georgia, staying in roadside motels, following clues from the flyers on gas station doors to small, out of the way bodegas tucked into sheds and the back rooms of homes, and stopping at roadside stands to buy pecans and candied fruits, glass jars of preserves, and once at an auto shop to deal with a flat tire. She makes sure to recharge her travel mojo bag after that one.
She’s over a week and a half in to her vacation when she pulls her VW Beetle into the parking lot of a roadside diner in East Bum Fuck Georgia around 8 in the morning, having left her last motel sometime before the sun was up. She could keep going. She has Pop-Tarts, a gas station mocha, and her GPS set for her final destination.
But she needs to be here. There’s something she needs to do. Though she’s not sure what it is.
Inside, the diner is all 1950s décor, blue and silver counters, tabletop jukeboxes and the smell of bacon, broiling beef, roasting potatoes and malt.
She slides into the booth the bouffant blond with the nametag “Coco” waves to, glances over a menu and then looks out the window. Waiting.
Captain America walks in an hour later.
Of course, no one knows he’s Captain America. And if Darcy hadn’t been such a history buff—all right, a Captain America and the Howling Commandos fangirl—and if he didn’t carry himself in a way eerily similar to Thor, same long stride and sure movements, she might not have recognized him. At least, not right away. Especially with the impressive scruff he was sporting.
He slips into the booth next to hers and she can feel the vinyl vibrating with the force of him. Or maybe that’s just her and the three cups of coffee and the chocolate shake she’s drank.
“What can I get you to drink, hon?”
Darcy doesn’t need to turn around to see the “come hither” eyes the waitress is making; she can hear it in the woman’s voice, the thickening of her accent.
Rogers orders water and as the waitress leaves him to look over the menu, Darcy considers and considers again and has to lay her palm on top of her coffee cup as the spoon in it starts to stir counter-clockwise with all of her considering.
“Try the burgers,” she says, turning slightly in her seat. “I swear they bring a whole side of cow to the table.”
“It’s 9 a.m.” Rogers’s eyebrows are slightly raised, but there’s a smile at the corners of his mouth.
Darcy shrugs. “Some people do steak and eggs, I do hamburgers and waffle fries. And chocolate shakes.” She offers her hand. “Darcy Lewis.”
“So, Steve Rogers, running toward or away from something?”
The answer, of course, is both.
As Darcy listens to Steve talk about his “site seeing” trip, she can hear the pain in his voice, see the shadows in his eyes.
They talk until the lunch crowd trickling in surprises them.
In the parking lot, they under the heat of the mid-day sun; she thinks Steve feels it too, that strange kinship that just happens with some people. It’s hard to say goodbye.
She invites him to see the ocean.
The coast is a little over an hour drive. She heads down Route 82, Steve following on his bike.
When she sees the bridge over the Brunswick River, stay cables rising up like sails over the water, she grins like a kid. On the bridge to the island, she rolls down her window, welcomes the mingling odors of sulfur from the paper mill and the dark, rich sediment that makes up the sea floor near the shore.
On the island, she hems for a moment at a traffic circle, then points her car in the direction of the historic district. When they park, she gets out of her car to see Steve, the beach wind ruffling his hair, a smile on his face.
They spend the afternoon wandering around the edges of the Club – “this used to be the hotspot for people like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers,” Darcy says – and the cottages with signs in their windows hawking everything from hand-dipped candles to boogie boards.
They go looking for the 400 year old oak tree Steve saw in one of the shop brochures. Darcy feels it—warm and thrumming with the energy of sun and wind and sea—before she sees the sprawling mass of it, heavy, moss covered branches resting on the ground.
“If trees could talk,” Darcy says, touching the trunk. And they can, after a fashion. If you know how to look, how to listen. This one has seen centuries come and go, has seen death and destruction, the rise and fall of slavery, been nourished by blood and bone.
A few pieces of bark slough off, flutter to her feet, and she murmurs a soft thank you and puts them in her pocket to package up later.
Steve has his hand on a thick limb and there’s something almost communal in his gaze.
The tree, Darcy thinks, has a little over 300 years on him. And then she shakes herself and they head back toward the Wharf where they finish out the late afternoon with dinner – po’boys for Darcy and shrimp and clam linguine for Steve – and live music and a sunset that sets the tops of the trees on fire.
Back in the parking lot, Darcy tells him she’s booked a room at the North end of the Island, on Driftwood Beach.
“There’s a Queen size bed,” she says. “And a convertible sofa.”
“Are you—I mean. You don’t know me,” Steve says, rubbing the back of his neck and looking at her like she might sprout a second head at any moment.
“I know you’re good people, Steve Rogers. And I know I like you.”
There’s a little-boy bashfulness to his smile. “I like you too.”
They sit on the converted sofa-bed, talking. Steve’s head rests in her lap. The television is on but turned low. The sliding glass door is open to the night; the wind comes in through the screen, bringing with it the salt scent of the sea, the ozone smell of a storm not far off shore.
His hair is soft beneath her fingers, crispy in places, where whatever he’d put into it had dried. He stretches his neck and hums under her hands. “Feels good.”
“My gran used to do this. Or I’d beg her to. Put my head in her lap and squirm like a puppy until she’d pet me. It always made everything better. I could think more clearly, see more clearly. No matter what was going on.”
“My ma used to do this. When she was home and I couldn’t sleep.”
“Haven’t had anyone to do it since?”
The tips of his ears flush pink and he clears his throat. “No.” Then softer, “Not for a long while.”
They’re quiet for a time, watching David Tennant sparring with an alien on the television, Steve with abject curiosity and Darcy with the air of someone who’s seen this episode a number of times. Then…
“I—“ he twists out of her lap, props up on his elbow. “I should tell you some—“
“Steve. I know,” she says. “You’re gonna catch flies.”
Steve closes his mouth. “You—how? When?”
“Well, contrary to popular perception, I occasionally watch the news. And I minored in history. You kind of stand out in a crowd.”
“You didn’t say anything.” The words are soft, faintly accusatory.
“To be honest… I wasn’t entirely sure how you’d feel about being recognized. But I know if I were on a solo road trip after coming back from the dead and then saving the world from an alien menace, I think I’d want a little less of the fame and recognition.”
A crease appears between Steve’s brows and his mouth pulls tight at the corners and Darcy wonders if she’s made a misstep, if she’s projected too much of herself into the situation and not been listening well enough.
Then the tension breaks and Steve smiles. “Thank you.”
Two little words hold so much. Thank you for telling me. Thank you for being honest. Thank you for not throwing yourself at me. Thank you for seeing me and not the uniform.
She invites him to lie back down. A few more moments pass.
“Steve?” There’s something I should tell you.”
He looks up at her from the side of his eye. “Your name’s not really Darcy,” he guesses.
“No. We’re stuck with that one, I’m afraid. Mom’s a Pride and Prejudice freak and I was supposed to be a boy.” She twirls a lock of his hair, smooths it down. “You know Tony Stark?”
“I work for him. Well, not for him, directly. I work for Jane Foster, who was technically hired by Pepper Potts, so I guess – if anything – you could say I work for Pepper, but it’s not Potts Industries it’s Stark Industries and…yeah.”
“Jane Foster? The scientist? …You know Thor.”
“Yeah. Little bit. He and Jane are a lot more, uh, friendly.”
“He talked about her. Briefly. He was sorry he had to leave so soon, at least without seeing her.”
Darcy smiles, sighs. “Would you mind telling Jane that when you meet her? Which could be very soon, because we’re living and working in the Tower. Which is why I wanted to tell you, now, since it might have been a little awkward to find me just showing up in your space. Don’t want you thinking I’m a stalker.”
“Tony says you have a room there. All the Avengers do. He’s renamed the tower, even. Avengers instead of Stark. They were putting an obnoxiously stylized A on the side of it when I left. You didn’t know?”
“Not exactly. Though now the card key and the paper with the number on it that was couriered to me in the middle of a highway in Kansas makes more sense.”
“That man is weirdly Big Brotherly,” Darcy mutters.
Steve looks confused for a moment, then shakes his head. “Thing is,” he says, “I already have a place. In DC.”
Darcy does her best to not let her expression drop.
“But, maybe I now have more of an excuse to make use of that room.”
They sleep together. Literally. Darcy can’t say she doesn’t want to climb Steve like a Jungle Gym, but she also doesn’t want to rush whatever this is or try and turn it into something it shouldn’t be.
So they sleep, in Darcy’s Queen bed. Steve’s feet hang of the end, but Darcy doesn’t need that much leg room, so they devise a sort of diagonal approach and curl around each other like tangles of seaweed in the dark, the sound of ocean waves in the distance.
The next morning, Steve’s cell phone rings. With a frown, he tells her he has to head back to DC. The line between his eyes is back, a much deeper furrow than when she’d told him she knew who he was.
“I’m here for a few more days,” she says, walking him to his bike. “I’ll be back in New York by the end of next week.”
“Maybe I’ll see you then.”
“Yeah,” Darcy says. “You know where to find me.”
Later in the evening, Darcy walks the shoreline as the tide is turning, Steve’s face after that phone call in her mind. She takes up a stick, worn smooth by water, and draws a set of three sigils in the wet sand. She murmurs an incantation under breath and lets the wind carry it away.
It’s not a spell, not a working. She doesn’t have anything of Steve’s to give it the oomph that it would need to have a direct affect. It’s a benediction. A prayer sent out into the universe, to ease transitions. She’s said it for the dead. Why couldn’t it be altered for those who had died and then gone on living?
A few moments more and the tide swirls around her ankles. Darcy lays her drawing stick down and turns back toward the hotel. She doesn’t stay to watch the water lap at the sigils, washing them away grain by grain, infinitesimal bits of power breaking off into the sea. Healing. Peace. And finally, forgiveness.
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