Chapter Text
It starts like this:
Steve enters the safe house he’d tracked Bucky to quietly. He makes sure that no one has followed him here, besides Sam, hovering over the house just in case something goes south and he needs back up. He makes sure that the floorboards don’t creak under his feet. He makes sure that he doesn’t trigger any traps or alarms that Bucky might have set up.
He gets as far as the kitchen, from the back door. It’s not very far.
He turns to step into the living room, and he sees an assortment of children’s toys, out of place in the otherwise empty home.
It starts like this:
Steve crouches to examine the toys, and when he stands again, he is met with a fist to the face. He stumbles back, almost crashing to his knees with the force of the hit.
“Cap! What’s happening?” Sam’s voice crackles back over the line. Steve does no answer, because he is busy getting punched in the face again. This time he does fall, just barely catching himself before his face meets the ground.
He groans, but turns in time to catch his attacker’s fist when they swing again.
“Bucky?”
It starts like this:
Steve catches Bucky’s other fist before he can try to swing at him from the other side.
Bucky struggles in Steve’s grasp.
“Woah, hey, Bucky, it’s okay, it’s just me, it’s Steve, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m just here to talk. It’s me, Buck, come on,” Steve pleads.
Bucky stops struggling, but the tension does not leave his body.
It takes another long minute, but Bucky finally says, “Steve?” and Steve relaxes a bit. He releases Bucky’s hands slowly.
“Steve, what’s going on in there? If you don’t answer, I’m landing,” Sam says over the comms, his voice laced with worry.
“No,” Steve snaps back, and Bucky’s face gets very confused, and then his jaw sets.
“Who else is here?” he bites out through clenched teeth, surging forward to press Steve into the wall, his flesh hand at Steve’s neck, applying just enough pressure to be a threat.
Steve shakes his head and grasps Bucky’s wrist a little desperately. “I brought a friend. His name’s Sam Wilson.”
“You’re not going to take her away from me.”
“Take who?” Steve asks, raising a hand to his throat absently as Bucky lets him go.
Right at that moment, Steve hears footsteps upstairs, and then footsteps on the stairs. And they are very small footsteps.
It starts like this:
A moment after the tiny feet have descended the stairs, a tiny head pokes around the corner.
It’s a little girl, her dark hair in two frizzy french braids, her blue eyes bright and fixed on Steve. Dear god, she looks just like Bucky.
“Dad?” the girl asks and Bucky melts at her voice, dropping to one knee so that he’s eye level with her.
“Yana,” he says, in a low voice, his tone soft and chastising all at once. It sounds a lot like how Bucky would sound when he would tell Steve off for getting into fights back Before. Steve would get hung up on that sentimentality if it were not for the fact that there is a little girl calling Bucky ‘Dad’ standing right in front of him. “I told you to stay upstairs.”
Steve freezes, not daring to move. Sam says something over the comms. Steve hears it, doesn’t process it, and ultimately ignores it.
There is a girl that looks exactly like Bucky, standing there and calling him ‘ Dad ’. Steve doesn’t know how to react to this.
“But there was a flying man outside my window!”
Steve slaps a hand to his face.
Sam.
“Sam, you scared the kid,” Steve mutters into his comm.
“I was trying to tell you that! I saw movement in a window upstairs and I came down to check out what it was. Didn’t think it’d be a kid,” Sam argues.
Steve sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“That was my friend Sam,” Steve says quietly, and Bucky snaps his attention to Steve. “We didn’t know that there was anyone else here with you. He saw movement and was checking it out. Neither of us are here to hurt her.”
“Why are you here then?” Bucky asks.
“Who are you?” Yana asks at the same time.
Steve crouches to Yana’s level and answers her question first, glancing towards the back door as Sam enters quietly. “My name’s Steve, and this is my friend Sam. We just want to talk to your dad if that’s okay with you both.”
Bucky hesitates for a long minute before nodding.
“You wanna take a look at my wings?” Sam offers and Yana smiles widely, though she hangs back for a moment, until Bucky nods for her to go. Sam and Yana step into the kitchen, still visible from where Bucky and Steve are sitting in the living room.
Bucky speaks to Steve, but doesn’t take his eyes off of Yana and Sam.
“What are you here for, Steve?” Bucky demands.
“We’ve been looking for you for months. Since you pulled me from the Potomac. Sam was even looking for you while we were in Sokovia. I just want to know you’re okay.” Steve takes a deep breath and glances at Sam and Yana through the door into the kitchen. “And I wanted to offer for you to come back to the upstate facility with us. You don’t have to be on the run, anymore. Especially with all the files Nat leaked about S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA, we can make sure you’re in the clear and you could have a place to stay. I didn’t know about the girl, but that doesn’t change things.”
“Don’t call her that. She’s got a name. Her name is Yana, and she is the most important thing in this world,” Bucky says with so much conviction Steve has to tamp down an urge to shy away from him.
“She really is yours, then, huh?”
Bucky nods. He rubs his metal palm with his thumb, over and over and over again. Like a nervous tick. “Yes.”
Steve’s heart seizes in his chest, and he has to clench his hands into fists and take a few deep breaths to steady himself before he even thinks about speaking. He doesn’t get to.
“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong. They didn’t… HYDRA hurt me, but not like that. They just took some of my DNA and spliced it with someone else’s to stabilize it and made Yana. I didn’t even know about her until the bridge.”
“The bridge?”
“The bridge. You. The first time you said my name. I started remembering again, when you called me Bucky. They fried it out of me right after, but then I remembered you again, on the helicarrier. And I started remembering more. I remembered her. I got her away from whatever scraps of HYDRA were clinging together.” Bucky states all of this with no inflection in his voice, his tone flat, like he’s debriefing someone after a mission, which Steve supposes is easy for him to default to.
Steve shakes that thought from his head quickly. “She wasn’t mentioned in any of the files Nat leaked.”
“Project Light, commencement date April 25, 2010. That’s how they listed it.”
“Is that--”
“They went based on her birthday. She’s about to turn six. It was a need to know basis project. Kept it real quiet. On the plus side, means a lot of HYDRA doesn’t know she exists. Made it harder for me to find her though.” There’s a whirring noise in Bucky’s arm as he clenches his metal hand into a fist and relaxes it a few times.
“Come back to the Avengers facility. Buck, we can help you, and we can help her.”
“You can put us both under lock and key,” Bucky snarls, suddenly glaring at Steve, his expression steely.
“We’re not gonna lock you up. We’re going to help you. Make sure your name is cleared, and make sure that Yana has a stable home. Living out of safe houses can’t be good for a kid her age. She’s gonna have to go to school, Bucky, and she’s going to need to have friends her age, and be a kid. Do it for her, if nothing else,” Steve pleads, feeling a little bad for using Bucky’s kid against him like this, but he needs to convince Bucky to come with them. He wants to ensure Bucky’s name is cleared for good, and he can’t do that with Bucky on the run like he really is guilty. “Come and stay for a few months, just for long enough for us to make sure your name is cleared, and then, if you don’t want to stay any longer, you’re free to go. You take Yana and you can leave. No one will stop you.”
“Yana will be kept out of all of that?” It’s a question, but it sounds more like a demand.
“I can’t promise that her name won’t come up, but I’ll make sure no lawyers or anything come anywhere near her,” Steve says, and he means it. This kid is Bucky’s daughter. He’ll protect her, come hell or high water.
Till the end of the line.
It starts like this:
“I’ll have our stuff ready to go in five minutes.”