Round 4

[norse_kink]

Round 4 is now closed.

Welcome to norsekink .

Keep up the awesome, folks.

Attention: Spoiler policy is now in place. For more information, go here.

NOTE: We've noticed that some of the prompts being posted have Thor characters only making cameos or not featured at all. We realize that Thor is closely involved in the Avengers, but we're requesting that any

Comments

Re: Fill: "saved until last" Part II

[mira_jade_fics]

Part II

Darcy snorted the first time she saw the man that her grandmother had hidden away. “You knew Captain America?” Darcy asked incredulously - she was first in her social sciences classes, and she knew all about the publicity stunt that was the star spangled Captain. She just hadn't realized that her grandmother would have been close enough to that circus act when there were so many other things demanding Peggy Carter's time during the second great war.

“I knew Steve Rogers,” there was a subtle correction in her grandmother's voice that she was quick to recognize.

“The ridiculous man in tights who sold war bonds?”

“The soldier who saved countless lives,” again, a correction. “Including my own. In more ways than one.” There was a slash of feeling in Peggy's voice - almost holy, as reverent as a prayer as she reached out to fondly touch the picture Darcy held. Her fingertips were callused, starting to wrinkle with time, and yet the smiling man in the picture seemed to smile even more so at the touch.

Ever sharp, Darcy immediately saw a story loitering there, one the decades had held their silences over. And so, she listened, for her grandmother had much to tell.

That was the same evening that she insisted that her grandmother teach her to dance. The old music from the phonograph was raspy and so very full, the notes lush with a forgotten age. Darcy laughed and tripped on her grandmother's toes too many times to count, and once again lamented Peggy's almost unearthly grace - wondering why that gene had skipped her. And in her grandmother's eyes, there was something lifting - something not quite unlike healing as they both danced around the ghost in the room.

Now, years latter, Darcy placed that same record on, and let the old music - a different time, a different place - surround her as she took her grandmother's photographs as her own. Beyond her, the sea beat a quiet dirge as in her mind, phantom figures still spinning to a timeless beat.

.
.

Steve Rogers is reborn with the spring.

While Darcy had become used to impossible things - curiouser and curiouser becoming an understatement a long time ago - she was still surprised when Nick Fury paraded her grandmother's most cherished memory around as the leader of the Avengers. Billionaire playboys in iron suits, Gods - those pro-mortal and those anti, guys in tights (even if Barton said no to the purple spandex - vehemently), and super warrior chicks, she could adjust to without blinking. Steve Rogers with the weight of the world in his eyes and absent the smile that her grandmother remembered even when her mind started to leave and time turned her further and further from the woman she had been . . .

She didn't know what to do with it at first.

When Jane introduced her to the good Captain, she let him kiss the back of her hand as if it were still a time when chivalry and such things mattered, and bore his double take - seeing the echo of someone he had once known in her features - with a careful smile and closed eyes. She was not only Peggy Carter's descendent in name, after all.

After the saving the world was out of the way - once Loki was back in his shadows and Jane had her Thunderer returned and the Hydra forces were far, far away from the Tesseract - Darcy took a trip back home. Under Anne Lewis' questioning eyes she took her grandmother's photographs. Her journals. The letters she had continued to write even after Steve was declared dead in action. Each yellowing envelope was still sealed - Darcy never could quite bear herself to breach such a privacy, and now she was so very thankful she didn't.

He deserved this, she thought . . . Out of his time, even if he was slowly finding a places with his ragtag group of heroes. Darcy herself couldn't even imagine it - sleeping for seventy years, waking up to find her family gone, Jane gone, even Clint and his smiles long past her. Holy heck, but would her iPod even work seventy years in the future? The thought was sobering, and her chest squeezed at the thought. A part of her instinctively took his pain as her own - he was her favorite bedtime story, the ultimate fairytale, and she wanted a part in that story's ending.