I remember damage. And escape. Then adrift for a long time in a stranger's galaxy. But I'm safe now. I found it again. My home.
30s/Bi/Lover of Cheese/Hater of Fascists
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“Any change?” Sue asks as she walks in with Franklin at her side. Like usual, she goes to the pod and lets her fingers rest lightly on the glass. She watches the blue shimmer pulse just out of sync with Johnny’s breathing.
Darcy shakes her head. “Not really.” She coughs once. “Um. There was a little bit of a spike on the thermal graph, but otherwise it’s been all quiet.”
“Anything to cause the spike?” Sue asks.
Darcy hears, Did you do anything to make him worse? With a side of, Did you hurt him again?
“No,” she says, answering all these questions with one syllable. “No idea what—if anything—caused it.” The room is suddenly impossibly small, and oxygen feels like it’s at a premium. “I’ll let you get to it,” she says under her breath and ducks out as quickly as she can. The door closes behind her, muffling the sound of Sue beginning to read out the numbers on Johnny’s monitors for Franklin to slowly type into his little tablet.
She sits on the couch and lets her head drop into her hands, resting her elbows on her knees. Her eyes are stinging from how dry the air is in the medical wing. That’s what she’s telling herself. Not from lack of sleep. Not from lack of peace. It’s the air.
If she could shut them for more than a few minutes at a time, she knows they would probably feel better.
But every time she shuts them, she finds herself remembering that stupid smile. That breathless Hey, Gorgeous. The sickening way Johnny’s head had lolled forward the moment he hit the ground. Practically lifeless.
We're here, we're queer, we're really fucking tired so we're just gonna go straight to biting instead of feigning polite confusion if you're gonna be a bigot this time, just so you know.
If criminals don't get to have human rights, then the people in charge of deciding what a criminal is get to decide who is and is not human. Do you understand? Is this not blindingly obvious? Do you care?
Or do you assume you will always be "one of the good ones"?
(because above all I crave validation and attention like the whore that I am)
She has first degree burns on her hands from where she pressed them to Johnny’s face. On her forearms, too, from where they’d wrapped around his neck. The edges of her hair are singed and every time a curl falls into her face, the sight of the crispy ends makes her chest clench. The clothes she was wearing still smell like smoke—they’re sitting in a pile on the floor of her bathroom. Three feet from the washing machine where she could toss them in and see how much she can salvage.
The same place they’ve been for the last four days.
Ava is okay.
Ava is going to recover from her time in the resonance field and gets to live with the knowledge that she saved everyone’s lives and kept the whole building from collapsing into a singularity.
“Thanks for that,” Valentina had added when she’d stopped by Ava’s stabilization chamber a few hours ago to give her the good news. “Would’ve been a real bitch to clean up. From a PR standpoint, mostly.”
Ava, still woozy from her heroics and the sedation they’d immediately delivered upon sealing her in the pod on the scene, had smiled with her eyes barely open. “Anytime, boss,” she’d said, holding up both hands with her pinkies and index fingers raised. “Rock n’ roll.”
The thought makes Darcy smile even now. Even while she’s sitting in the least comfortable chair in the galaxy waiting for something to change in Johnny’s condition.
The monitors don’t look like anything she’s used to.
They’re not heart‑rate lines or oxygen saturation numbers or anything she recognizes from any of the hospitals in which she’s had to sit vigils. The recovery chamber they had to build for Johnny was cobbled together from several different machines and way too many phone calls with Charles Xavier. It looks like a glass casket that’s constantly scanning and reporting out readings for things she’s never had to think about before.
Darcy can read them now. She’s had four of the longest days of her life to learn.
The first screen is the one she watches the most — the thermal graph. A jagged, angry line that spikes and drops like a seismograph during an earthquake. Johnny’s temperature isn’t the problem; it’s the erraticism.
Reed explained it as soon as he got it online, in that maddeningly calm way of his. “We need a plateau. A stable baseline. Until then, waking him risks ignition.”
Darcy had nodded like she understood. She didn’t really. She does now. If Johnny wakes up without the capacity to regulate his abilities, he could set the whole hospital on fire, starting with himself.
The second screen is worse. It shows a pulsing amber waveform labeled METABOLIC OSCILLATION INDEX, which Darcy now knows is genetic mutation scientist‑speak for his cells are still vibrating wrong. The line should be smooth. It isn’t. It flickers like a bad radio signal, like he’s still half‑caught in the resonance field.
Every time it stutters, her stomach drops.
The third screen is the one she hates the most: FLAME‑REFLEX SUPPRESSION. A simple bar. Red. Always red. Everyone in charge has agreed that it needs to at least turn yellow before they can risk waking him.
Darcy has never hated a color so much in her life. If she’s ever able to stop staring at that particular angry block, she thinks she might officially retire her favorite red lipsticks and work on getting into pink.
There’s a fourth monitor too — a soft blue hologram hovering above his chest, mapping the faint glow under his skin. Mapping where he’s still phasing despite their best efforts to stop it. It pulses in irregular waves, like his body is trying to ignite and failing. Like a lighter sparking without catching.
She burned her hands on that glow.
They forced her to ice her hands for the first twenty-four hours—kept swapping out these cooling mittens that froze the tips of her fingers but, to her irritation, did actually ease the sting of her burns.
The most important thing is that we keep blisters from forming, the doctor had said when she complained about how these bizarre accessories hindered her ability to use her hands for anything practical.
But that’s not the most important thing, Darcy thinks, flexing her fingers to keep the still-healing skin from getting too tight. The most important thing is Johnny regaining consciousness and control of his abilities.
The most important thing is that he’s still alive for her to be angry with once he wakes up.
“Come on, sweetheart; I’m sure Darcy wants a break.” Sue’s voice interrupts her thoughts and forces her to sit up straight, breaking her line of sight with the monitors. She can hear them outside the room, in the small waiting area with the more comfortable furniture. Squashy armchairs and a couch where Sue has been sleeping most nights.
“Do I have to clean up?” Franklin asks over the sound of crayons hitting the coffee table and papers shuffling.
“No, I don’t think so,” Sue decides out loud. “Just leave your drawings for now, okay? I’m going to need your help logging some readings for Daddy.”
While she gets to her feet and stretches, vainly trying to untie the knot sitting just above her left shoulder blade, Darcy has to admire how hands-on Sue remains in making Franklin feel part of the team. She treats him like a tiny scientist or an intern. If he didn’t seem to love it so much, she’d be concerned they weren’t letting him be a normal kid.
But the more time she spends with him, the less Darcy takes for granted that Franklin actually is a normal kid.
Darcy doesn’t really like it when Sue is the one to take over watch duty. She doesn’t seem to be able to look at her. Not squarely in the eye like she did before.
Not that Darcy blames her. She wouldn’t want to look at the woman her brother almost idiotically died for. The woman who would have handled the situation just fine without almost killing her brother if he’d waited a few more minutes before flinging himself into the jaws of death.
The woman who did not ask for him to do this.
“Any change?” Sue asks as she walks in with Franklin at her side. Like usual, she goes to the pod and lets her fingers rest lightly on the glass. She watches the blue shimmer pulse just out of sync with Johnny’s breathing.
Darcy shakes her head. “Not really.” She coughs once. “Um. There was a little bit of a spike on the thermal graph, but otherwise it’s been all quiet.”
“Anything to cause the spike?” Sue asks.
Darcy hears, Did you do anything to make him worse? Did you hurt him again?
“No,” she says, answering all these questions with one syllable. “No idea what—if anything—caused it.” The room is suddenly impossibly small and oxygen feels like it’s at a premium. “I’ll let you get to it,” she says under her breath and ducks out as quickly as she can. The door closes behind her, muffling the sound of Sue beginning to read out the numbers on Johnny’s monitors for Franklin to slowly type into his little tablet.
She sits on the couch and lets her head drop into her hands, resting her elbows on her knees. Her eyes are stinging from how dry the air is in the medical wing. That’s what she’s telling herself. Not from lack of sleep. Not from lack of peace. It’s the air.
If she could shut them for more than a few minutes at a time, she knows they would probably feel better.
But every time she shuts them, she finds herself remembering that stupid smile. That breathless Hey, Gorgeous. The sickening way Johnny’s head had lolled forward the moment he hit the ground. Practically lifeless.
Because of her.
She shakes the thoughts away and searches for an immediate distraction. Finding one in tidying up the coffee table, she starts by collecting the crayons Franklin left littered all over the place. Two have rolled to the ground—black and gray.
And then she notices how worn down they are. Almost completely flat unlike the rounded tips of the other colors. He’s had to peel away some of the paper wrapping.
She lets her eyes drift over the drawings on the table. So much black. So much gray. Franklin seems to start out drawing regular things like his family or rooms in the Watchtower, but eventually, they all develop the same, black swirls and circles somewhere in the middle. She sifts through a few of them, trying to ignore the way they twist her stomach.
“Oh, good,” she says out loud, just under her breath. “We’re totally fucking the kid up, too.”
Not wanting to look at them anymore, she finds one that’s almost cheerful and places it on the top of the pile. It’s of a streak of red and orange, led by a blue figure with yellow hair.
Darcy presses the heels of her hands into her eyes until stars bloom behind her eyelids. It doesn’t help. The dryness, the ache, the exhaustion — none of it budges. She drops her hands and stares at the floor instead, at the scuffed tile and the faint reflection of the overhead lights. Anything to keep from looking at the monitors again. Anything to keep from imagining the worst.
She leans back against the couch, lets her head tip against the wall, and tries to breathe past the knot in her throat. She tells herself things that have usually worked to calm her down in the past.
She’s good. She’s fine.
She’s holding it together. This is just par for the course of living in proximity to superheroes.
But her mind won’t stay here. It keeps slipping sideways, sliding into old grooves she thought she’d worn smooth years ago.
It’s because of the smell. The faint, lingering scent of smoke still clinging to her skin, her hair, the bandages on her hands. It reminds her of another fire. Another emergency. Another moment when she’d been alone in a building that was shaking itself apart.
And suddenly she’s not in the med‑wing anymore.
She’s back at the upstate Avengers compound, years younger, adrenaline still buzzing in her veins after sprinting down a stairwell and forcing open a sealed door with a Stark tablet, a bobby pin, and a plucky attitude her current self would find borderline insufferable. The alarms had only just stopped. Her hands had been shaking then too. She’d been proud of herself for getting out on her own. Proud of being clever enough, quick enough, competent enough.
She remembers walking down the glass hallway, looking for Steve because she wanted to tell him she was okay. She wanted him to know she’d handled it. That she’d made it out without needing anyone to come find her. That she hadn’t been lying when he’d asked her with a look over his shoulder, “You good?”
She was good.
She was better than good.
She was fucking great, actually.
When she found him, he was with Wanda. They were standing close together, arguing. The sight had stopped her short. Those two never argued.
Wanda’s voice was sharp, furious in a way Darcy had never heard before.
“You left her alone, Steve. Darcy could have been killed.”
Darcy had stayed frozen in the doorway, unseen.
Steve — tired, scraped up, still vibrating with post-battle endorphins — ran a hand through his hair.
“You know the rules, Wanda,” he said, sounding as this was something he’d said a million times. “If we go into battle trying not to get anyone killed, we wind up getting everyone killed.”
Wanda stepped closer, eyes blazing.
“She is not a soldier.”
Steve’s jaw tightened.
“Darcy is brilliant and competent. She doesn’t need rescuing.”
At the time, Darcy had felt something warm bloom in her chest. She’d stepped into the hallway then, and Steve had turned — and the look on his face…
God.
That smile.
Relief so bright it felt like sunlight breaking through storm clouds.
He’d crossed the hallway in three strides, cupped her face gently in his rough hands, checked her over like she was something precious.
“You’re okay,” he’d breathed, like it was the only thing that mattered.
She’d smiled and nodded. “Told you I would be.”
Darcy opens her eyes again, the med‑wing snapping back into focus. The waiting room. The ugly framed art prints. Just in the next room, a bright red bar that refuses to turn yellow. The faint smell of smoke still clinging to her skin.
She presses her bandaged hands together and whispers into the empty room, “I don’t need rescuing.”
But this time, the words don’t feel like the badge of honor she’s always carried them as.
They feel like something she’s trying very, very hard to believe.
She finally stands and makes her way back to her apartment for the night.
Her smoke-soaked clothes stay on the floor for the fourth night in a row.
stormborns
izzy806
ellievsbear
annaxmalina
jbbartram-illu
dededos
tangentwithtanner
