The Story Book

  Cont... Bucky found Darling outside as the welcome home party rolled on inside the Compound. Everyone had eaten their fill of food, and now there was music and stories being passed around for the last few hours. It was joyous and overflowing and peaceful. Here in upstate New York, you could see the stars, and that's where Bucky found Darling. Outside on the patio, soda in one hand, staring up at the stars. He stood next to her for a little while, staring up at the stars. \ "We did it." Darling whispered, "We outran the past."  "No, we conquered the past." Bucky said firmly, "We'll never be rid of it, but we are free of it."  "Is this what life's supposed to feel like?" Darling asked, "So, light?"  "Yeah. Yeah, it is."  "It feels good."  "Yeah, it does."  "I could get used to this." "They view or the feeling? Cause I've got a better view in Wakanda."  "The...

  Cont... The common room in the compound was, for the first time since Peter could remember, completely clean. The coffee table was actually shining. He resisted the urge to put his feet on it as he and Harley sat on the couch in nervous anticipation for the upcoming announcement.  Mr. Stark had made a moving speech two days ago to the UN, the remaining Accords Committee members, the Senate, Congress, and the Army. "Without balance, the world falls into chaos. Without balance, we fall. The heroes of this world do need oversight, I'll admit to that, but they don't need to be collared. Putting under the Accords as they stand now would chain down the ability of heroes to save the most potential number of people. Think about that, people dying because we aren't allowed to go help. The world needs heroes, whether we'd like to admit it or not. Whether they're good or bad got out civilizations, we cannot ignore the fact we now need them. We're in the age of neces...

Cont... Everett watches as they put his boss into a hulk proof cage and has a sudden flashback to watching them put James Barnes in a similar restraint two years ago. He looks over at the man in question, watching it all happen from a few feet away, arms wrapped around his daughter. "How'd you know he had hulk genetics?" Everett asks, coming over.  Darling shrugs, "Something he said. I did some digging. There's a big mess left from the Queen incident. Just had to look hard enough."  Bucky smiled at his daughter's words, but Everett could see something was tampering it, "You good?" Everett asks casually without thinking.  Bucky sends him a surprised look before shrugging, "Glad it's not me this time." He nodded towards the cage, which is getting wheeled away to a cargo container so that there's no damaging evidence for the public.  Everett winced, "Yeah, sorry about that."  "Don't be. The past is the past. No...

  Cont... Secretary Ross walked through his empty floor towards his personal office in the CIA Langley headquarters. The Accords had been good to him, and opposition was fading. Stark was still a problem. Stark was always a problem. Ross grit his teeth. Stark might need to be eliminated soon if he persisted in being a problem. Another thing he'd have to outsource to his brother. Ross sighed; working with his brother was getting riskier and riskier as his ambitions, his plans grew. They weren't kids stealing weapons for chum change any more. He had the greatest weapons manufacturer known to man at his fingertips now. He had all the heroes of the world in his control. And what did his brother have? A failed project of children assassins. A violent drug no one would buy. Failures. He had risen to power while his brother had failed to accomplish anything other than the luxuries of life. Useless. He, too, was becoming obsolete. Soon he would need to go. Ross steed into his office an...

Cont...   Darling talked to Everett for four hours on the pier. Bucky watched from a safe distance as the two talked. Everett had a lot of questions. Darling had long answers, but by the end, Bucky felt it went well. Watching as Everett walked away and the crowd swallowed him up, Bucky came over to stand next to Darling.  "You think it went well?"  Darling hummed watch Everett disappear, "I think so." "Good. Hungry?"  "Starving."  Bucky laughed, "Clam Chowder?"  "Duh."  Bucky laughed harder. Putting his arm around her shoulders, they started walking into the restaurant area.  "What did you think?" Darling asked, leaning into him as they walked.  "What do you mean?" Bucky asked as they got in line for chowder.  "I know you were watching. What did you think? Do you think he's trustworthy?" Darling asked.  "I think he's one of those people that has a really annoying moral compass that do...

Cont... Coney Island. Of all the places in the world, the girl in the recording wanted to meet at Coney Island. But if she was Barnes's daughter, it would make sense.  He had been informed that she would find him in the crowd. How he wasn't sure. But he trusted T'Challa, so he wandered around the pier watching for a girl to approach him. The pier was busy, full of families enjoying the joys of the amusement park. He stopped and watched the Cyclone fly by, clattering on its tracks loudly.  "You gonna ride it?" Someone asked, nudging him.  "No, never was one for coasters." Everett shook his head, watching the Cyclone throw a car through a corkscrew.  "I get that. My dad made my uncle go on one once. My uncle puked." The voice laughed.  Everett stopped, puking on the Cyclone, a well-known story about Steve Rogers when he was young. Everett whipped around to find a dark-haired girl standing next to him.  "Hopefully, he's not like that now,...

  Cont... Darling waited for Bucky to come out of his third session in a fancy memory jogger machine. Since finding out his subconscious was home to dangerous information, they were forced to find and copy it. The more they knew, the better they could predict who was coming for them.  Tony called the machine BARF. He had the stupidest acronyms.  Bucky was always shaken when he came out, but they were making lots of progress. Shuri estimated that they would only need five sessions to find it all. The bad part was that part of his mind would have to relive the worst parts of his life. She'd equated it to dredging in fishing. You'd pull up a lot of fish or useable information, but you'd also pull up a few unwanted bits. It was hard. But it was working.  Harley sat with her silently as he worked on his tablet. Darling had given up on the book she'd been trying to read, so now she was watching him do rapid math on his tablet, trying to keep up.  The door opened sudde...

  Cont... The first thing Everett Ross did once T'Challa left was to watch the recording.  The second thing he did was read through all the provided files.  Then he rewatched the recording. Then he made a mental note to try and get Sergeant Barnes out of the heat they'd been putting on him since the Berlin incident.  After that, he dug through his cabinets for a burn phone he kept for things like this. Then he called the Attorney General. Once he explains the clandestine nature of the information he was holding and how it was imperative that it not get out, they arranged for him to fly back home under a guise in the next week.  When he hung up, he then decided to listen to the recording a third time. Listening, he was struck by the person Ross was talking to sounded young. Feminine but not Romanoff, not Maximoff either. Too young to be in the conflict two years ago. It might be one of the Wakanda agents, but there was no accent, and Everett didn't think T'Challa...

  Cont... Everett Ross put the last of the dishes he'd used for dinner into the dishwasher. He loved his job, but the relentlessness of the paperwork machine that was the UN's terrorists prevention task force was draining.  Going into his living room, he dropped into his chair and flipped on the news. It wasn't special, just a report of an old abandoned mining facility that burned in Australia. It was so remote it had only recently been discovered, burned to rubble. Everett was about to turn channels to his favorite soap opera when there was a knock on his door.  Groaning, he got up, "Who is it?" Coming to his door, he checked the peephole. The door was open in ten seconds flat.  T'Challa smiled, "How are you, my friend?"  Everett sputtered for a moment, "Good, come in, come in!"  T'Challa came in, followed by two Dora guards. "Nice place you have." The king commented, looking around the remarkably spacious apartment.  "W...

  Cont... Bucky watched as the sports car pulled into the garage at 12:30 at night. He turned and headed to Tony's lab, where they would put the recordings together. The boys seemed fine. They were talking a mile a minute, working and putting all the recordings together. Darling, on the other hand, was sitting in silence, watching intensely.  Bucky walked over, "You okay?"  Darling looked up at him, "I will be. When this is over."  Bucky pulled her into a hug. Letting her bury her face in his chest. Darling sniffled, "I just want it to be over."  "I know, I know." Bucky said quietly, rubbing her back, "It will be soon."  "So we have it decrypted?" Rhodey asked, coming down into the lab with Tony in tow.  "Almost. Have to clean up the quality." Peter said.  "So we were right?" Tony asked excitedly.  "Yeah, you were." Darling nodded with a small smile.  "Will it be enough?" Rhodey aske...

  Cont... "I told you so," Darling said, first thing she was safe inside the overwatch plane. "Whatever. That was awesome!" Peter launched himself to hug Darling.  Darling laughed, "Glad you found that amusing."  "Of course! You were the best spy ever. You also stink." Peter said, quickly retreating from her presence.  "Dude, you're a wimp. It just smells like liquor and smoke. You smell worse coming back from patrol, reeking of blood, and who knows what." Harley scoffed, hugging Darling also.  "I'm not used to it, okay? Goodness, Harley, leave me alooonnneee." Peter jokingly whined.  Darling chuckled, "Did we get it?"  "Yep, if I'm right, he confessed to about 16 crimes. We have him." Harley grinned.  "At least this way, it won't take years to fix this mess," Peter said with a matching grin.  "At least. Is our cover still good?" Darling asked, turning to Harley. "Ye...

  Cont... Darling flipped the injection capsule over her knuckles as they waited in the darkness for Ross. Peter had condensed the injection into a coin-sized capsule that needed to be placed on the skin for a quick, painless injection. She would need to inject him while he wasn't paying attention, preferably before they met.  The dark alley she was in was an entrance to a bar where Ross and Randle had met before. She would need to bump him in the darkness before he got into the club. It was genetically engineered to not activate on her, but whoever she attached it to it would instantly inject.  A faint buzzing made her look up at the sound. As promised, the drones were invisible and near-silent to those who didn't have super senses. Harley knew what he was doing, though, as the sound drifted away. A car door slammed, and Darling's head snapped around.  "Keep the change." A gruff voice said before the van pulled away. Darling sank into the shadows as a man came in...

  Cont... "Quebec?!" Harley stared at Darling, fully healed, in disbelief. "We have to chase this moron all the way to Quebec to get a confession?"  "Pretty much." Darling huffed, running on a treadmill.  "But we can't even arrest him! He'll be in foreign soil, which makes him a foreign diplomat, which means diplomatic immunity!" Peter argued, "It's useless!"  "No one said anything about arresting him," Darling said darkly.  Both boys stared at her in partial horror. "No, you at not scything him to prices!" Harley shot that idea down, "That's a diplomatic bomb!"  "Goodness, I'm not gonna kill the guy, you maniacs. But if I did, no one would know it was me, so there would be no charges. It'd just be pandemonium." Darling rolled her eyes.  "So you have thought about it!" Peter accused.  "That's not the point. The point is we're not killing him. I'm ...

  Cont... The rest of Darling's surgeries went well. Now all that was left was her face which would take hours and careful precision. She was up and walking now, getting more and more of her strength back. Her last surgery was scheduled for a week from now.  Progress on changing the Accords wasn't working due to Ross stonewalling them. Steve was getting frustrated. He was venting to them when Tony burst in, tripping over his own feet, "I got an idea!"  "Breathe before you choke," Darling warned without missing a beat.  "What's going on?" Steve asked, slightly irked that he'd been interrupted so rudely.  "Tony's been working on a potential lead he found and has been keeping us up to date," Bucky explained.  "A lead on what?" Steve asked. As far as he knew, the case in Australia had been closed, and all that was left was the legal battle against the Accords.  "On a possible connection between the Australia mission...

  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...