The Story Book

  Cont... "She's gone now, Darling." Tony picked some feathers out of his hair as he tried not to laugh. Darling's room was a mess, and she was fake sleeping under a layer of feathers. Cho was furious, and Tony was pretty sure his ears were still ringing from her lecture.  Darling sat up now that it was just them and began trying to shake the feathers out of her blankets with just her feet, "Well, that was fun."  "Understatement." Bucky grabbed her blanket and shook it out for her.  "Of all the things I expected to happen, that was not it," Tony said, pulling the last of the feathers out from his curls.  "Why were you up here at this hour anyway?" Darling asked, shaking the feathers out of her pillow.  "I was here to see you, actually." Tony turned to Bucky.  Bucky raised an eyebrow as he gave Darling her blanket, "Really?"  "Yeah, I finally figured out why that guy you blew up seemed familiar." Ton...

  Cont... Smuggling Darling stateside was easier than expected. But having a powerful foreign dignity and an ex-assassin on your side helped too. Now she was inside the Avengers Compound receiving painstaking treatments for the burns. Bucky had come with her. But not before he was placed within the royal family and exempt from arrest on foreign soil. Shuri had also come for the medical side of things.  Dr. Cho was welcoming to all of them and didn't bat an eye at Bucky. She was calming and confident that the procedures would go well. Privately both she and Shuri were worried that the serum and wounds from the arc reactor, put in initially to save Darling's life, would negatively affect the surgeries and the Cradle regeneration process. But it didn't.  They treated her left leg first, and when it was done, it was like new. She was still restricted to her wheelchair because her muscles had been shredded, and they needed physical therapy to get them moving again. But it work...

  Cont... Darling's body took to the first doses of Extremis wonderfully. She was no longer at risk of internal bleeding and could breathe on her own. They took her off most of the regulators and life support. It did so well she could now get herself from bed to her wheelchair and roll herself around.  But for all the good it did for the internal, it did nothing for the external. Her whole body was still burnt and painful. The Extremis was almost accidentally designed to heal severe burns, so Shuri and Cho were rightly concerned when it didn't. They were worried that giving her more doses could hurt more than help. The solution they came up with for it wasn't much better.  They would have to do surgery, remove the useless burnt tissue and then put her into the Cradle and regrow that section. And they would have to work square foot by square foot to accommodate the difference in damage. It was horrifying but their only option. Unless Darling wanted to live in that conditio...

  Cont... It took time for Darling to wake up. It wasn't like the movies where she just blearily blinked awake. She had moments when she would open her eyes but not respond. Times she would mumble but not make sense, but slowly she was waking up.  Shuri was fairly certain that she was in no danger of falling back into the coma after a week of her keeping up a steady sleep schedule and not forgetting anything. She and Cho were already talking about transferring Darling stateside to begin regrowing her damaged tissue.  Darling hadn't said much. She was really quiet and seemed to be dealing with everything that had happened. Shuri was confident she remembered most of what happened leading up to her fall but the fall itself and everything after might be fuzzy.  Bucky thought her silence had something to do with all the dead kids they'd found. Her face afterward was horrified, sad, angry, and something more. She'd known those kids; some looked about her age, she might hav...

Cont... Bucky almost missed it when Darling did eventually wake up for the first time.  Months passed, and Tony was neck-deep in a political battle against Ross over the Accords. Progress was going slowly on all fronts.  They had done all they could without taking any risks. Any further treatment required her to wake up. Things were at a standstill. Bucky had stepped out to stretch his legs when he heard something change.  He froze in the doorway between the hospital room that had been his home for the last few months and the hall. Something was off. Every part of him went in alert, trying to figure out what. There was no one else on this floor. The sound of electricity flowing through the walls hummed, the sound of the air system whispered, the machines kept beeping rhythmically, the heart machine thumped- The heart monitor was fast.  What had been a steady thump was now speeding up to a double thump in the same time span. Turn around quickly, Bucky came over to the...