((Random one-shot, inspired by a favorite episode of Cold Case.))

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It takes her a few instances of Captain America stopping dead in his tracks, staring at her every time he has cause to drop by SHIELD HQ, before Darcy asks Jane what his deal is. That's when it starts to fall into place, at least for Darcy. Jane tells her how yes, Cap is -the- Steve Rogers, and he'd been preserved on ice for seventy years.

"The staring is probably because of that v-neck," Jane had smirked, returning to her work, and Darcy had grinned right back. But inside, Darcy's gut churns, and it does whenever he looks at her after that.

Because if that is the real Steve Rogers, then he's the man her grandmother met in London one night, long ago. He's one of thousands of soldiers who'd had Cher Lewis' pin-ups by his bunk. He's the guy who stammered over his words, telling Cher how much she looked like this girl back home, Peggy. How he was gonna ask Peggy out when the war was over, take her dancing. And Cher had spread her full, red lips and signed his photo, left a kiss on his cheek, and wished him good luck, love and kisses.

Darcy knows all this because Cher had told her daughter the story over and over in the late 50s, when her looks were fading, and she was a single mother with a drinking problem in a decade when a girl like her didn't have many options. Claire Lewis had held onto the story with a pill of bitterness, good mother though she herself turned out to be. She'd used the story has a learning opportunity, telling her own daughter, Darcy, to never be that flighty, that short-sighted, or she too would be left with nothing but a good story and a failing liver.

Darcy knew her mom meant well. That maybe she got a little more afraid, as her child grew up to look more and more like Cher. Blue eyes instead of brown, and waves instead of tight curls, but those same full lips, full curves, and easy smile. Darcy had studied and worked hard though, and not given much weight to fancy or physical beauty, as her mother had desired for her. Still, that story was wistful to her, despite Claire's best efforts. It was old time romance and war stories and more than once, when she peeled off her layers of frumpy Goodwill-wear, Darcy would swipe on some red lipstick and try out her grandmother's poses in the mirror in her old-timey underthings, comparing herself to the old shoots.

So when Steve Rogers finally gets up the nerve to approach her cubicle, shuffling his feet, Darcy is far from offended or embarrassed. That he saw her before even knowing her name...that she looked enough like Cher to make him wonder, to make him ask Sitwell about her background...it warms her from her toes to her cheeks.

"Miss Lewis? I hope I'm not ah, being presumptuous, but..." He bites his lip, offering her a brand new print of Cher. Darcy laughs, delighted. It's from one of her iconic patriotic shoots, giving a coy wink from behind a war-head in her stockings, mules, and nothing else. "...My uh, signed original's been lost to time, but..."

"Soldier, I'd be honored," Darcy winks, whipping out a pen and proudly scrawling Cher's name in the corner.

With love and kisses, to Steve.

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