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The yacht had disappeared nearly a month before. A violent storm had come up so quickly that they hadn’t had time to make it to shore. The fact that a team was still out searching for the remains or any survivors felt like a bit of a lost cause.
But today there had been smoke coming from a direction with no land so the mission changed in an instant. When someone was in distress, the Steve’s team became whatever assistance they could provide.
Natasha watched the monitors as Sam prepared the rescue supplies.
“Think it’s someone we should arm ourselves for?” Sam yelled over the sound of the boat’s motor.
Steve stood at the wheel with binoculars trying to get a visual. They had encountered smugglers out here once. They had been looking for a man who had radioed in distress and then lost contact. Instead, they had come across some men smuggling illegal goods into the country. They had had to defend themselves very quickly which had actually manifested as them standing in clear view with their hands up except for Sam on a bullhorn asking them if they knew the whereabouts of a missing fisherman or his boat.
“Be prepared, but don’t scare anyone until we know more.”
“I’ll send Redwing,” Sam called back, and a moment later, he was bringing up the visual on one of Natasha’s monitors as the drone flew out over the open water ahead of them.
It actually took a minute for them to realize what they were seeing when the drone finally reached the origin of the smoke.
“That’s survivors,” Natasha said excitedly. “I don’t know from what, but those are people!”
Suddenly Sam was shouting at Steve.
“That’s people. Go faster! Go faster!”
Their little boat wasn’t much to look at, but it was tough and it could almost fly as it sped along the surface of the ocean. Steve put it in top gear as he hurried to the location the drone was hovering, only slowing down when they got close to the wreckage.
It was hard to take in at first. It almost felt as though the image they were seeing was a mirage. It just looked so impossible. They’d never actually found anyone who had been missing longer than a week. Now they were staring at people who had been missing for twenty-nine days.
An adult and child with plastic tarpolin tied around their heads and arms barely stirred when the boat approached. The child’s head bobbed a bit as they tried to look at the boat, but the adult didn’t stir.
Steve, Sam, and Natasha stood frozen as they peered down at the little raft in front of them. Inflatable, barely big enough for three. The two in it had driftwood collected in the middle. A plastic bucket was atop that and more wood was atop that. The top wood was on fire. It was a stupid set up- incredibly dangerous and a potential waste of good supplies. But no one was going to judge them. They couldn’t say they wouldn’t have done the same in such a desperate situation.
Natasha opened and closed her mouth as if she were going to say something, but no sound came out.
The child on the raft reached into the water and lightly splashed the adult, but there was little change.
Except it jolted the rescuers back into action.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
“I don’t know who he is. He hasn’t said a word,” Steve told paramedics as they met him at the dock. Somehow a news crew had arrived as well and had cameras set up and ready, but the team knew how to ignore them.
“But that’s the little girl. Kobik Schmidt,” Natasha followed up. “She’s said a few words.”
“Yeah. Like telling us she didn’t think we would ever find them. And that her eyes hurt,” Sam informed them as he followed them to the ambulance.
“Did anyone think to ask her who the man is.”
“She calls him Bucky,” Sam said with a reluctant look. “No one missing on the yacht with that name.”
“No family has reported him missing?” a woman with a microphone asked.
“I’m sure they’re looking for him too. We’ll figure it all out.” Steve helped to usher the news crew away from Sam and the ambulances. “Let them get medical treatment first. That’s the most important thing. Then we will see where things go as they recover.”
“Do you think this means the others are gone?” a man behind the camera called.
“I can only tell you we found two people. They’re the only ones who can fill in that information for us and they’re in no position to do that right now. Everyone please respect their privacy at this difficult time.”
Steve, Natasha, and Sam worked together to back the news crew away from the ambulances as they closed their doors and headed into the city with the survivors.
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
It was two days before Natasha visited the hospital.
She carried two containers of mixed fruit with her and a yellow-maned lion stuffed animal under her arm.
She walked down the hallway of the children’s ward and dipped her head in room 448, but to her surprise, no one was there.
“Kobik Schmidt?” She inquired at the nurse’s desk.
“We can’t get her to stay. She’s with Mr. Barnes who rescued her,” a nurse told her quietly. “She’s quite attached.”
Sure enough when Natasha made it to Mr. Barnes’s room, she found both the man she had helped from the water and the little girl.
She raised her hand to knock, but stopped when she noticed the child was asleep on one side of the bed.
“Hey,” Natasha spoke quietly instead. Her voice was naturally low and at times like this, she was grateful.
The man glanced up from where he sat on the bed. His beard had been trimmed close and his hair looked clean again, but his eyes were still bloodshot and his skin was still sunburnt.
“You may not remember me, but I’m Natasha Romanov. My team is the one who found you.”
The man nodded a little.
“James,” he introduced himself back. “Some people call me Bucky.”
“It’s good to see you looking a little more alive, James.”
He nodded. “Thank you. I’m told it’ll start to feel better soon too.”
“I brought fruit to help,” Natasha held up the fruit a little before going around the bed to get the wheeled table that James could use over the bed.
“Thank you,” he replied. “I’ve been mostly eating popsicles and broths to get hydrated again.”
“You look better than you did the other day,” Natasha assured as she opened the lid of the fruit and handed Bucky a fork.
“I guess that’s something,” he replied. “Two nurses gave me a bath. It was so exhausting I didn’t even get to think about how much pain I was in.”
His cracked and dried out hand reached for the fork when Natasha felt something ache inside her.
“I don’t want to overstep, but I could feed you,” she offered softly. “Just so you don’t exert too much energy. I know you must still be trying to get your strength back.”
James hesitated.
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“Make up what?”
“I owe you a lot. For finding me. Now this.” He handed her the fork back. “So I’ll make it up to you.”
“Finding you was just doing my job. And I offered this,” she said with a raise of the fork.
She stabbed a piece of cantaloupe and brought it to James’s cracked lips, and he accepted it easily. He chewed with a determined look on his face and then nodded toward the arm that was near Kobik. It was in a cast.
“They said this arm is never going to be the same. Nerve damage, multiple fractures. It’s the arm I held onto her with. I knew if I held onto her with it, I wouldn’t let the pain stop me. If I was holding onto something for me, I’d probably give up.”
Natasha offered him a strawberry and he was silent while he chewed.
“It was a very brave thing to do. I can’t imagine.”
“Now they want to take her away from me. They’re trying to contact her family, but no one wants to take her. She was adopted by the Schmidts. Now they’re gone and she’s alone again.”
“She has you.”
“I know. I don’t have any family either.” He looked down at the sleeping little girl beside him. “We’re all each other has now.”
Natasha understood in a second.
“I know a good lawyer.” She raised a piece of watermelon to James’s lips.
“I don’t have money for a lawyer. I just need-“
“Matt won’t be worried about your money, but after this, you charge for interviews until the money from the Schmidts comes in. They surely had trusts for her. And some kind of provisory for paying their employees in case of death.”
When Natasha raised the next piece to his lips, he shook his head.
“Schmidt was a terrible man. Cruel and callous. He reveled in other’s pains and thought he was superior to everyone. I doubt he had anything in place for us.”
Natasha was quiet a moment as she placed the fork back in the container.
“That’s why you only saved the little girl.”
“Kobik is still good.”
“I’ll talk to Matt about representing you. If anyone asks, the others went into the sea and that was the last you saw of them. You rescued the one you could.”
James shook his head.
“Schmidt’s other daughter tried to cling onto me. She was just as cruel as he was, laughing at other’s misfortune. She enjoyed hitting and mocking the staff.”
“She sounds like a real winner.”
“I shoved her off of me. I shoved her off and then used a dinner place to hit her face when she tried to grab me again. The boat was half submerged. The rest of them were gone. Kobik was adrift already. Sinthia Schmidt would have sacrificed me in a heartbeat for herself. And she never liked Kobik anyway, always reminding her she was their dad’s real daughter. Kobik was the only one worth saving.”
“I was an orphan and I’ve lived in dangerous situations. You don’t have to justify anything to me.”
Natasha wanted to put a hand on his arm, but thought better of it.
“She doesn’t know. I saved her after.”
“And it’s going to stay that way.” Natasha looked James in the eye. “I’m going to get you a lawyer. You’re going to say you could only save one. The others were already gone or you didn’t see them.”
“I don’t want anything else bad to happen to her.”
“Then keep taking care of her.”
Natasha picked back up the plush lion she had brought and tucked it next to Kobik.
“And if you want to make this up to me,” Natasha said with a smirk, “Come find me when you get out of here. I’m sure we can think of something.”
James looked confused, but he had a smile at the edge of his lips.
“I like nice dinners, flowers, movies,” Natasha continued.
James shook his head. “I wasn’t even flirting with you.”
“You said one word on the boat that day and it was while clinging onto my arm. You looked at me and said, ‘Date?’ I told you the actual date on the calendar and you shook your head, but couldn’t seem to get the rest of your brain to cooperate. Took me a bit to put together that you just couldn’t remember how to properly flirt with someone.”
James looked mildly embarrassed.
“You are beautiful. Maybe I was just stunned.”
“You were half-dead, James.”
James laughed and Kobik stirred.
“Get better,” Natasha instructed him as she picked back up the fork. “And I’ll get you the lawyer and we can surely make some kind of plans. You do have a future to worry about now. Let’s try to all plan ours together.”