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There are exactly two things all four Barnes siblings have in common: their crooked smiles and their love for Steve Rogers. Steve and Bucky meet when Bucky is seven, Becca is five, and Evelyn and Joanna aren't even born. Becca can hardly remember, and Evelyn and Joanna have never lived through, a time when they didn't all adore Steve. Simply by virtue of being their big brother's best friend, Steve is all three girls' first crush, though the crush dies quickly for all three because he's also something of another big brother.
When Joey Thompson pulls Evelyn's braids every day for a week, Steve teaches her to throw a punch to get back at him. And when Evie comes home with split knuckles from knocking Joey's front tooth out, Steve draws her as a knight on horseback, carrying a sword into battle. She keeps the picture for her whole life, even when a collector offers her over a hundred thousand dollars for it when she's sixty-two years old. “This isn't Captain America merchandise,” she tells the young man sharply. “This is a present from my Stevie.”
When Joanna gets pneumonia and has to go to the hospital, Steve brings her his old stuffed teddy bear, the one that used to see him through every sickness, and tells her stories about all his times in the hospital. Sarah Rogers is assigned to the TB ward but comes to visit Joanna every day she has to stay and sneaks her a chocolate bar and keeps the nurse in charge from noticing all three Barnes siblings and Steve sneaking in. When Joanna is fifty-four, a Steve Rogers biographer asks if she could have ever guessed Steve would grow into such an important person. “My Stevie already was an important person,” Joanna scolds.
Steve overhears an older kid saying things he'd like to do to Becca, things he'd never dare say if Bucky were in earshot, and tackles the guy to the ground even though he's probably got a foot on Steve. When Becca hears what happened—and sees the damage on Steve's face—she marches straight up to the oaf and knees him in the family jewels. She tells him he'd never had a shot, but beating up Steve Rogers is the stupidest way to get her attention she's ever heard. Then she uses up the last of her birthday money to buy Steve a whole packet of new drawing pencils. The man Becca ends up marrying asks if Captain America was as brave as the comic books and newsreels said. “My Stevie was brave long before he was Captain America,” she tells him with a smile.
When Sarah Rogers gets sicker and sicker, Steve starts spending more nights sleeping over at Bucky's. Joanna's the only one young enough to still get away with sneaking into Bucky's room at night, a privilege she abuses liberally when Steve is sleeping over, so Steve and Bucky have to be even more careful and discreet than usual. When Bucky gets exasperated and makes a blanket fort to keep Joanna out of his room, even Becca, a dignified sixteen years old, partakes in a sleepover with ghost stories.
Bucky spends a week with an uncle who teaches him woodworking, and he makes a chair for their kitchen table so Joanna and Evelyn don't have to share when Steve comes over. There is, literally, always a place for Steve at the Barnes' table, even if it is a chair jammed a little closer to Bucky's than is strictly comfortable. There is a quiet acceptance of just what Steve and Bucky are to one another—Winifred and George suspect, Becca is the closest to Bucky so she's known for years, and even Evelyn and Joanna somehow understand that there's something more to it than the kind of best friends they see on the street. No one ever says anything about it; the chair takes up permanent residence in the house, and the family goes right on incorporating Steve.
When Bucky is gone for a month doing his basic training before he ships out, the girls take turns hunting Steve down and fussing over him—Becca always sends whatever boy fancies her to make sure Steve's not getting hurt, Evelyn bakes him his favorite apple cake every week, and Joanna models for him in two-minute stretches, because that's as long as she can sit still. (Bucky always says this disdainfully, as if he's any better.) The day Steve's getting ready to leave for Camp Lehigh, he's planning to slip away without telling anyone, but Joanna sees him going toward the train station on her way to school and clings to his leg until he tells her where he's going. Then she cries and cries until he promises to write her once a week and send her drawings.
Once Bucky and Steve are reunited, they send joint letters to save time and space. Evelyn quickly puts an end to this—“Steve Rogers, don't you dare go thinking we don't want letters from just you and please quit letting Bucky get away with lying through his teeth in his letters”—so if Steve gets called into meetings and can't find time to write, he draws up comic strips to slip into the envelopes at the last minute. They get new dog tags when they start up the Commandos and Steve and Bucky both send their old pair back home to the Barnes family. All three girls argue over who gets to wear them, until Winifred gets home, looks at them all incredulously, and claims them for herself.
“Mothers get first pick,” she says cheerfully as Joanna wails about how unfair it all is.
“You're not Steve's mother!” Evelyn argues with her hands on her hips.
“I'm the mother he's got left,” Winifred shoots back, and George smiles and sends the girls to bed.
Anyone who asks any of the Barnes girls about their soldier brother ends up getting an earful about both boys, and all the rest of the Commandos to boot. For their part, Steve and Bucky both talk about Becca, Evelyn, and Joanna so much all the other guys can rattle off their ages and favorite foods and best qualities. (For Becca: her fire; Evelyn: her sense of justice; Joanna: her loyalty.)
“Oh, look at this,” Dugan rolls his eyes. “More letters from home for the Rogers-Barnes tent.”
“It's a good thing Cap's already in with the family,” Morita laughs. The guys poke fun, but they're not exactly complaining when packages of apple cake and cherry pie, Steve and Bucky's favorites, respectively, turn up at camp and there's enough to share.
After that terrible day in the Alp's, when Steve can't seem to talk to anyone, not even Peggy, he manages to write a letter to the girls. His handwriting is shaky and there are tears splotched onto the page, and when Becca sees it she sobs so hard she thinks she might break in half, sobbing for both Bucky and Steve because Bucky's gone but now Steve's all alone. In the letter, Steve tells them they didn't find any of the letters the family wrote to Bucky because he carried them around in his pocket, so he died with them. George writes Steve a letter (which he never receives) about how much they love him and don't blame him and want him to come home safe to them.
When the man in the uniform shows up on their doorstep to tell them what they know—Bucky's gone—and what they don't—Steve is, too—he's met by four crying women and a man with wet eyes.
“Our boys, our boys,” Winifred sobs. “We lost 'em both.”
For the rest of her life, Becca keeps a framed photo of Steve and Bucky in her living room. Evelyn keeps her knight picture and Bucky's letters in her bedside table until the day she dies. Joanna finally inherits the dog tags and wears them around her neck until she goes into a home in her seventies.
All three women are interviewed by scores of historians, biographers, and writers. All three women say with a conspiratorial wink, “I was always Steve and Bucky's favorite.” All three women believe it to their very core.
When Steve wakes up, and realizes how much time's passed, he is afraid to look up the girls, the same way he's afraid to look up the Commandos and Peggy, but he does it both out of a sense of duty to Bucky and a desperate, crushing need to see what happened to his girls.
Becca is gone, dead for two years after reaching the ripe age of ninety-two. Evelyn has been dead the longest; a drunk driver hit her on her daily walk when she was sixty-five and she died on impact. Joanna is alive, Steve learns, but she's been in a coma for nearly a month by the time he gets to the hospital, because she's been fighting cancer for years now. He sits at her bedside and holds her hand and tells her he's home, and if it were a fairytale she'd wake up and put her hands on her hips and order him around like she always used to. Instead, nothing happens, and she dies a few weeks later.
“She told us all about you,” one of Joanna's daughters tells Steve with tears in her eyes. “She never once called you Captain America. It was always my Stevie.”
Steve makes it home before he breaks down in sobs. The history books all say Bucky Barnes was the oldest of four children, that he had three younger sisters who adored him and whom he adored right back. What none of the history books realize is that Steve Rogers adored those three little girls, too, an adoration forged from years of teasing and protecting and fussing and fighting and cooking and drawing and love.
It's true: Bucky Barnes had three younger sisters. But so did Steve Rogers.