Chapter Text
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Snow.
At least a foot of it blanketed Brooklyn in every direction outside Bucky’s top floor apartment window.
Well, not technically Bucky’s top floor apartment window. Clint’s top floor apart—
Okay, their top floor apartment. In Bed-Stuy. In Clint’s building.
On Christmas Eve.
Bucky couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a white Christmas, which was kinda funny, considering his call sign was the Winter Soldier for nearly seventy years.
Not that Hydra had thawed him out and hung a stocking from his cryo tube, or given him access to a watch, much less a calendar that would have told him what season it was, or even what month during his decades of captivity.
Bucky sighed.
Winter made him maudlin.
Clint would say the lack of sunlight and Vitamin D were giving him Seasonal Affective Disorder or some shit, but Bucky knew the winter blues when he felt them.
His youngest sister Ruth’s family was having a big, family to-do the following evening, Christmas dinner and all that. It was the first time Bucky and his fella had been invited anywhere as a couple for a function that didn’t ultimately end with a scolding about something they’d blown up, knocked down, or some brand of destruction the two of them had otherwise caused in the chaos of battle or an all-you-can-eat brunch.
It made a nice change.
Or would have, if the door hadn’t blown open just then with a thump and a, “Futz! Bucky! Call Katie and get the number of the vet she’s using for Lucky!”
Bucky was on his feet and beside his boyfriend before the door rebounded from the battered sheetrock behind it.
“What?” He pulled up short at the lump bundled up inside Clint’s ratty, purple hoodie. “What is that?”
“She was in a soggy box outside the pizza place under the little door awning they have out front, you know?” Clint babbled, unzipping his hood and lifting the tiniest brown and white spotted puppy Bucky had ever seen from his chest. He’d stuffed her inside his striped beanie, too, but it wasn’t enough. The poor little doll was shivering and making noises Bucky was pretty sure signaled some kind of respiratory distress. “Her breathing got funny on the way home, all raspy and wet-sounding. I don’t like the sound of it, so I called every vet in the top thirty ‘near me’ results on google on my way home, but they’re all going straight to voicemail. I don’t know what to do!”
“We’ll warm her up, that’s all.” Bucky took charge, bustling Clint into the bathroom—grateful they’d taken Tony up recently on the offer to make some luxury upgrades to the apartment while he was doing the same to their place in midtown at the tower. Their new teak shower room had a steam feature as well as a sauna option.
“Dry heat or wet heat?” Clint fretted over the steam shower and sauna controls, rubbing the puppy’s back when she fell a bit listless.
“Neither,” Bucky decided as he thumbed through google results and flipped over a low basin they used for soaking their feet. “Water, warm, but not too hot, maybe a degree warmer than the average best body temperature for a newborn puppy,” Bucky decided, barking at the voice-control panel for the faucet controls. Water poured into the basin as Bucky grabbed one of their towels and stuffed it in the bottom of the shallow container. “Lay her down in that bath when it’s full. I’m gonna see what else we can do after we warm her up. Just don’t get her head or ears wet for now, okay?”
Clint nodded, rubbing her back and warming her with the heat of his hands until the faucet shut off automatically when the basin was full. “Thanks, Rosie,” Clint murmured to the built-in A.I. He knelt on the floor in his soaked jeans, clumps of snow falling from his Converse as he settled the puppy upright and cupped a handful of water to pour gently over her back.
After a quick scan of office hours posted for the top fifty veterinary offices listed in the city, Bucky gave up and dialed the one person he knew could find them a medical professional without calling fifty different numbers.
She picked up on the second ring, “Hello?”
“Pepper, it’s Bucky,” he got right to the point. “We’ve got a veterinary emergency and we can’t find an emergency vet open in the city tonight. Would you mind if we borrowed Jarvis—”
“Jarvis, find James a vet and ping his location to send a quinjet,” Pepper didn’t bother waiting. “What kind of dog is it this time?” Even Pepper knew Clint well enough now to know what was going down without much prompting.
“Uh…” Bucky looked over Clint’s shoulder. “A puppy, newborn, by the looks of it. Unknown breed. Not sure it’s even opened its eyes yet. Clint found it in a box in the cold out on the sidewalk—”
“Holy shit!” Clint yelped and Bucky gaped in shock when the puppy’s body rippled and suddenly transformed.
Into a crying, human baby.
“Pepper.” Bucky licked his lips as the baby wailed. “Scratch the vet. We’re gonna need a pediatrician. A human baby one.”
“I… I’m sorry?” Pepper’s confusion was apparent.
Fuck, so was Bucky’s.
“The puppy is … no longer a puppy . It just did … I dunno, something, and now it’s not a dog anymore. It’s a human.” Bucky ran a hand through his hair. “But it’s breathing still sounds like shit—s’cuse my French, ma’am.”
“Forgiven,” Pepper murmured absently. “I’ve got a doctor friend visiting upstate who can help, but I’ll need to call her personally. The jet is coming for you now. I’ll order some … baby things, I suppose?” She waited for Bucky’s assent. “We’ll figure this out, James,” she promised before hanging up.
“Buck.” Clint looked up at him with wide, round blue eyes. “I just thought, ya know, it’s Christmas Eve. She shouldn’t be alone in that shitty, wet box on Christmas Eve. Even the towel someone wrapped her in was soaking wet and starting to freeze. It … it was raining before, but it’s snowing now. I barely heard her cry. If I hadn’t, she would have frozen—”
“I ain’t mad, Hawk.” Bucky knelt beside his shivering fella. “You did the right thing. Even more so now we know it wasn’t just a free puppy.”
“Who’d just leave a baby in a box like that if they knew, though?” Clint drew a fingertip down the side of her face and over her plump, pink cheek. The coughing ceased momentarily and she curled into the warmth of Clint’s hands.
“Dunno, but I can guarantee you we won’t be doing the same. We’ll find her folks or … figure it out somehow, okay? She’s with us now. She’s safe. And Pepper’ll make sure she’s got the best care available.” He cupped the back of the baby’s head and pushed her gently into Clint’s chest, pulling a towel from the warmer with silent thanks to Rosie for flipping it on when they entered the room. “ We’ll make sure she’s got the best care available now.”
“Yeah.” Clint sniffled and struggled to rise to his feet hands-free.
Bucky made grabby hands for the baby. “Give ‘er here and go change into something warm and dry. We’ll need some civvie go-bags,” Bucky called after his retreating boyfriend’s back when Clint made the trade and spun on his heel to go gather what they’d need. Clint waved a hand over his shoulder in acknowledgement and scurried up the steps to their bedroom loft to toss some cold weather gear into a pair of bags. He grabbed a couple of spare T-shirts, too, to wrap the baby in until they could find more appropriate clothing.
Bucky pulled one of their cotton sofa blankets from the back of the couch to wrap up the baby before they headed up to the roof to catch their ride. It was one of the blankets his sister Ruth had knitted for him while he was still recovering in Wakanda and it felt right to wrap the baby up in something made by his own sister.
“Hey,” Steve murmured quietly when the quinjet ramp dropped to admit them and they climbed aboard. “Heard you guys had a little excitement. Darce and I were just getting ready to go down to Rockefeller Center when Pepper paged the team floors to see if there was anyone available to fly out to Brooklyn. Heard you found an abandoned baby with some special abilities?”
“Like those baby drawers the nunneries used during the war,” Bucky confirmed, cuddling her close. “Helluva thing. Thought she was a puppy at first. Well, she was a puppy at first. Never seen anything like it.”
Clint didn’t wait for Steve to return to the cockpit, running through the return flight checklist with Jarvis at top speed and barking at Bucky to sit down and buckle up.
“Gimme a hand, Steve? She’s squirmy,” he chuckled, one-arming the baby and trading her arm to arm so Steve could buckle him in around her. “Didn’t even have time to pick up diapers and clothes, or a car seat. She’s got this terrible, wet cough and Hawk’s gonna catch a pneumonia, too, at the rate he’s out runnin’ all over Brooklyn with wet hair and no damn hat on.”
“Pepper’s friend, Faiza, is flying downstate to meet us in Medical at the tower,” Steve explained. “Me and Darce will take care of whatever clothes and necessities Pepper couldn’t order while you get her checked out. There’s a couple boutiques right around the tower should have everything you’ll need. Bruce is still up there and Sam’s on his way back from Stark House up at Fifth Avenue. His ma’s visiting, too, and she’s been a pediatric nurse since she retired from the army. Figured she’d have some experience we could use the next twenty-four hours or so.”
“Thanks, Steve.” Bucky cast a worried glance toward the cockpit. “Check on Hawk, will ya? He’s … pretty shaken up. Hell, he was freakin’ out when he thought it was just a sick puppy. Now it’s a baby and he’s havin’ maybe some flashbacks? Abandonment stuff, ya know?”
“How about I hold her and you go check on your fella’s state of mind?” Steve offered instead.
Bucky took him up on it. “Remember,” he said, handing her over after Steve buckled in, “ya gotta support her wee head and lean ‘er up here, high on your shoulder. Might help her cough out some of that crap in her lungs.”
Steve shooed him off and cuddled the baby up close while Bucky went up front to check in on Clint.
“Hey, angel.” He palmed the back of Clint’s neck. “You okay up here alone?”
“I’m fine, totally fine. Baby’s okay? Steve has her?” he checked, craning his head to lean around Bucky and check on their tiny passenger.
“She’s warmer to the touch now and she’s not so listless. Cough still sounds like crap, but I’d rather hear her breathing than not, you know?” Bucky cast a worried glance back to the passenger area himself.
“Yeah,” Clint agreed, swallowing audibly. “Yeah.”
“Pepper’s got a friend comin’ down to meet us and Sam’s ma’s been a nurse most her life, works with kids all the time,” he offered all the assurances he could muster. “And we can always check in with Shuri if we need to. They got that portal thing she’s been workin’ on with Foster. We could be in Wakanda in a couple minutes if we had to and the baby’d get the best doctors in the world there if she needed.”
“I just met her and I…” Clint whispered. “I don’t know what I’ll do if anything happens to her. Never felt like this. ‘Cept when I found Lucky.”
“Maybe you been touched by angels for real, Clint,” Bucky gave voice to a thought that had been crowding his brain since the apartment door banged open. Hell, since Clint found Lucky. “Saved Lucky’s life, too, didn’t ya? Always wadin’ in where anybody else knows they’d get their ass kicked? Or double-checking what that noise was when you heard an animal cry? Maybe that’s your gift. You ever think a’that?” Bucky nudged his boyfriend’s shoulder.
“Yeah, sure,” Clint scoffed, swiping at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “You and Steve got super strength and healing; Tony and Bruce got brains; Thor got … well, abs and girls; Nat got a particular skillset. And my superpower is sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong and picking up strays, sure.” He snorted.
“You saved Nat. She was a kind of stray in a bad way,” Steve’s voice floated in from the passenger area.
“Don’t let her hear you say that.” Clint snorted.
“He’s not wrong,” Bucky pointed out. “And now she’s saving lives, too. And that time you argued with Coulson over taking down Thor could be argued as savin’ him, too. Made Coulson stop and think, didn’t ya? Lotta lives you saved by pickin’ up that one stray, much less two or more. Imagine how many other lives you’ve affected doing something that comes naturally to you.”
“Picking up strays?”
“Empathy,” Bucky corrected quietly.
Clint had nothing to say to that, so they rode together in silence most of the way to the tower. Bucky eventually returned to the back to buckle in and take the baby back from Steve. She’d grown a bit damp, having piddled down Steve’s front, but that was nothing new. Half the babies in the nineteen-forties had peed down Steve’s front while he was selling war bonds.
“We’re here,” Clint announced as the quinjet’s landing gear clicked into the clamps in its docking station at the tower.
Pepper stood just inside the hangar’s vestibule, flanked by a woman with golden skin and a generous dusting of freckles across her nose. Her hair was covered by a fitted scarf, but she was dressed in the familiar red scrubs they used in the tower’s private medical facility. On the other side of Pepper, Sam waited with Dr. Strange.
“Whoa, Pepper really did pull out the big guns. Faiza’s who I’d want treating me if Shuri wasn’t available,” Bucky said with a low, impressed whistle a moment before they disembarked. “Dr. Hussain,” Bucky greeted the visiting doctor, “thank you for coming on such short notice. You, too, Doc, and Sam.”
“She’s got a wet cough, a bad one. And she was, uh, listless before, when she was, um, a puppy. She’s a shapeshifter or a little werewolf, maybe…?” Clint rambled, running a hand through his hair and glancing back over his shoulder, with an impatient flick of an eyelid that Bucky refused to take personally. Clint didn’t mean nothing by it. He was just anxious about the baby.
“Caught the bronchitis or a pneumonia, maybe,” Bucky said, dipping his knees like his ma always done and swaying as he rubbed the baby’s back.
“May I?” Dr. Hussain asked, reaching out with both hands. Bucky transferred the baby, no longer crying, but still coughing wetly. Dr. Strange departed with her, but Sam remained behind with Pepper.
“I’m gonna head down to change and meet Darce so we can go pick up that stuff you need. Do you think you’ll be sleeping at the tower tonight?” Steve asked, glancing up from a rapid-fire text discussion on his phone. “Tony says there’s some modern baby stuff for guests down at the mansion. He’s having porters bring some of the newer baby gear up: a portable crib and changing table, and a swing, I guess? Anything else you think you’ll need?”
Clint turned to Bucky with those wide, deer-in-headlights eyes again and Bucky couldn’t help but chuckle. “Darce has all those little brothers. I’m sure she’d know better what we’ll need the next few days than we do right now. And Jarvis will have some suggestions.”
“Nine out of ten pediatricians recommend…” Bucky heard Jarvis’ voice erupt from Steve’s phone as his best pal clapped him on the shoulder and wished them both and the baby well.
“Just wanted to let you both know,” Sam explained, “my folks and I are gonna be back and forth from Stark House all week as needed, but you should consider us on-call day or night for any baby or family emergencies. It’s not uncommon for veterans who are new parents to have some … we’ll call ‘em re-entry issues. You need a hand, sing out, alright?” Sam checked, looking them both in the eyes to be sure he was heard loud and clear. “My mama’s down in Medical now, rounding up whatever pediatric supplies we’ve got scattered through half the tower for Dr. Hussain. I’ll be up in the Commons with my old man and whoever’s hangin around unless I hear from y’all tonight.” He threw them both a salute and cleared out.
“All of Stark’s resources are at your disposal, Clint, James,” Pepper explained. “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, day or night, no matter the time, have Jarvis page me. Tony, Bruce, and I made the decision to stay here after we heard about the baby. It was not a difficult decision. No, you can’t talk us out of it,” she cut off that argument before Bucky could start it. “It’s easier to arrange for any experts or professionals you’ll need if we stay here. Besides, this team is Tony’s and Bruce’s family. When someone is sick, you don’t go your separate ways, right? You come together.” She pressed a kiss to each of their cheeks. “I’ll have something sent up for you both for dinner in a little bit, and I’ll text Darcy to grab a can of formula until we’ve got some idea of the baby’s unique nutritional needs. I don’t imagine it’ll be anything as simple as just giving her soy formula if she’s half … werewolf or something.” Pepper rolled her eyes and smiled in that pragmatic way of hers, and sent them downstairs to check in on the medical team’s progress.
Hours later, Bucky and Clint had finally been permitted to scrub up and don some disposable gowns so they could join the baby in Stark’s hastily assembled NICU. She wasn’t strictly critical, but Dr. Hussain, erring on the side of caution, had asked that visitors be limited to just the baby’s doctors and guardians. (Outside their little NICU, Pepper snapped her fingers and mumbled something to Jarvis about calling downstairs to Legal to sort out guardianship when she realized they’d need that finalized in a way that would let Clint and Bucky continue making decisions regarding the baby’s care until blood relatives could be located.)
Just after midnight, the rest of the team gathered behind the big observation window to check in on their teammates and the team’s newest, tiny addition. Clint held the baby on his bare chest when Dr. Hussain directed him in something called kangaroo care. Bucky walked over to the window to explain, “Doc Hussain says she’s not even two days old yet, judging by the umbilical cord, and maybe a preemie. Skin-on-skin contact helps the baby’s body regulate her core temperature. I run a little too hot to hold her that way for long, so Clint’s doing the lion’s share until she’s a little more stable.”
“If you need more regular human help with that,” Darcy raised a hand to volunteer to trade off with Clint when he needed rest.
“Thanks, Darce,” Clint murmured into the fuzz on top of the baby’s head.
“Does she have a name yet, Yasha?” Nataliya asked. Her cheek dimpled in a way that Bucky knew meant she was smiling on the inside. She’d only arrived an hour earlier and was the least nonplussed of them all to hear Clint had found an ailing, shapeshifting werewolf baby in a frozen box on Christmas Eve. “We can’t keep calling her ‘the baby’.”
“Jessa Natalie, just until we hear whether she can stay for sure,” Clint decided, glancing up from the tiny pink bundle on his chest.
“Jessa?” Bucky wondered at the addition to the handful of temporary names they’d come up with in the hours since they started pacing the floors in Medical.
“Well, she’s a girl. You can’t call your abandoned werewolf Christmas baby ‘Jesus’, obviously.” Tony gestured to all the pink balloons and curling ribbons, and hurriedly purchased baby gifts sitting all over the adjacent waiting room. “Jessa’s nice. And easy to spell,” Tony pointed out. “I hear that’s important.”
“Jessa Natalie has a nice ring to it,” Steve elbowed Nat.
Nat’s lips pulled up in a tiny smile. “It does.”
“Whaddaya say, Buck?” Clint drew Bucky’s attention from the waiting room back to his two angels. “Good name?”
“Perfect. You did it perfect, angel.” Bucky leaned over to kiss his fella. “All of it. Just perfect.”
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