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Steve peeks outside the window, down the road, in front of the yellow light pole on the pavement that breaks the evening’s darkness.
He moves back quickly, shoulders against the wall like he’s done it a million times while on a mission, silent and precise like a soldier.
A deep breath, and he’s once again at the window, his eyes dancing around the two figures standing just outside the light of the pole, one slightly taller than the other.
He allows himself few more seconds to search for a cue, an answer to the tingling in his hands, the heavy discomfort in his chest.
He’s not sure whether he’s pleased to find nothing at all.
It’s almost ten o’clock – he’s pretty sure curfew is still a thing in this century. He’s read enough books about adolescence and raising teenagers to bet on it.
They’ve never been restrictive parents – the world seems enough cruel to their family as it is, neither him nor Bucky have ever really wanted to give Sasha less than what she can ask and deserve.
Maybe Steve is biased, but Sasha really is the most amazing kid.
They never have to worry about her – he shouldn’t have to worry about her.
But he’s only a man. Worse, he’s only a father.
“Leave ‘em alone, Steve.”
Steve licks his lips, takes a deep breath. He should feel guilty, but the knot in his stomach outweighs the tiny voice in his head reminding him he’s effectively violating his sixteen-year-old daughter’s privacy.
To surprise to no one at all, that tiny voice sounds incredibly like Bucky.
“In a minute,” Steve replies, “Just making sure.”
From the angle of the couch, Bucky flips a page of his book. “Making sure what? That she’s not accidentally going to rip his hand off if he tries to kiss her?”
Steve is horrified. His head is spinning.
He quickly turns to look at Bucky’s amused face. “You think he’s going to kiss her?”
Bucky wets his red lips. He grins at his book. “They’re sixteen, Steve. What were you doing at sixteen?”
Steve turns once again, once again eyes looking down the road. They’re still where he just left them.
“I was too busy fighting pneumonia and scarlet fever. Kissing girls wasn’t on my priority list. You should know.”
“Damn right I should,” Bucky mutters, and Steve can hear his smile. “Still, I don’t think you would have liked your parents spying on your first date. Not that Sarah wouldn’t have done it, had she had the opportunity. That woman invented gossip.”
Steve can’t help bite off a smile – his sweet mother, bless her soul, was the nosiest person in Brooklyn. She used to blame her work as a nurse, but the truth was that she simply enjoyed knowing everyone’s business. It gave her a sense of peace, and control over things she often had not control over.
Steve used to find it annoying, definitely a bit weird.
That was before. Now he’s a parent. Now he knows.
A pinch on his side makes him sighs heavily. He’s finally feeling guilty.
Sasha is standing still in front of the kid from her class who invited her to bowling via text a couple days ago. He’s still talking – it’s been almost five minutes now – and Sasha is staring at him like she’s too polite to tell him to shut up, a deep line between her brows, eyes attentive but kind. She looks bored, but not scared. Her body language is not telling Steve she’s feeling in danger, nor that she’s feeling uncomfortable or unsafe.
She’s just incredibly and comically bored.
Steve decides he’s done. He turns, leaving the window to spy on the road. Bucky is still reading, but he shifts on the couch so that Steve can sit on his side, Bucky’s long legs resting on his lap.
“I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here,” Steve feels the need the say, “It’s almost ten o’clock. They’re kids. She’s legally a child, and she’s late.”
Bucky finally looks up from his book. He stretches enough to place it on the coffee table, then he rests his metal fingers on Steve’s cheek, a small caress which is enough to make Steve feels silly and incredibly in love.
“She’s also a former HYDRA child,” Bucky says, a shadow in his voice. “She’s half a super-soldier, her biological father is Captain America. She was raised by the Winter Soldier, and her godfather is an actual God. I’m pretty sure she’s not really risking anything by standing outside the building listening to an awkward kid talking about their awkward date.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” Steve admits, a bit ashamed.
“Do what?” asks Bucky.
“This,” Steve replies, gesturing their spacious living room, tinted of yellow by the floor lamp Pepper gifted them when they moved in. “You’re always so calm. You’ve always been the chill parent. You never worry, it’s like everything is always under your control. You’re so safe. Every time.”
“Steve…”
“…and you make me feel safe. I can spend an entire evening waiting at the window, thinking of every possible scenario in which she’s out there alone and needs us and we’re just here. But then I look at you and you’re so…perfect, and fine, and I end up just feeling a stupid, overprotective father.”
“Steve.”
Bucky’s both hands cup Steve’s cheeks, his fingers gently brushing the thick beard on his tired face. Bucky’s eyes are incredibly deep, and beautiful, and full of love and concern. Steve feels like drowning, and it’s the kindest of the deaths he could ever wish for himself.
Not for the first time in his life, he wonders if it’s possible to feel this type of love, so furious and yet so fragile. He grew up thinking love wasn’t for men like him, no matter the centuries, the multiple lives he feels he has lived. And yet, Steve thinks to be exactly where he’s always meant to be. Next to Bucky, inside his hands, below his flesh and metal fingers, on a second-hand couch in Brooklyn, with a pumpkin spice candle to fill up the house, waiting for their daughter to come back home.
Bucky smiles at him like he knows every single comma of Steve’s thoughts, like they’re just another page of the book he’s been reading.
“I do worry,” Bucky murmurs, voice deep and kind, “I worry all the time you and Sasha leave the house. I worry when you’re on a mission and can’t let me know where you are or how long you’ll be away. I worry when Sasha is at school and someone asks her about her childhood, and when she wakes up the middle of the night begging for someone to stop hurting her.”
A sharp, stabbing pain hits Steve’s chest harder than he’ll ever admit. He’ll never know the full extent of the trauma the first years of Sasha’s life gave her. He knows it was enough for her to be non-verbal for five years – from the age of 6 to 11; enough to turn her slender body into a palette of scars and cuts, tiny little reminders, so that neither of them can ever forget the horrors she was put through.
Bucky doesn’t like to talk about those years: they dealt with those painful conversations many times, often with the help of Dr Raynor, sometimes in the aftermath of Bucky’s many nightmares. Steve knows enough about Sasha’s childhood, more than he sometimes thinks he can handle, definitely not enough to ever satisfy his visceral need to be useful, to fix it.
Bucky’s replica of the serum never turned out to be as successful as Steve’s, at least according to HYDRA. Bucky was the first surviving victim of that slaughterhouse, Sasha the only one after him.
Years after the rise of the Winter Soldier, another mad pseudo-scientist used the remaining of Steve’s DNA sample still in the hands of HYDRA to create Sasha – a child, a baby. Genetically half Steve’s, born from a poor woman who died before Sasha took her first breath.
Bucky remembers Sasha’s first months, they haunt him in his sleep. He told Steve he can still sometimes hear her cry. She used to cry so much, Steve, they’d feed her and change her every three hours. Then they’d leave her cry in that lab like she was nothing. In between missions they’d put me in cryo, but she was there every time I’d come out. Neglected, screaming like a damn broken record. I never saw her, but I heard her. I heard her every time.
Steve’s read too many books throughout the years which told him about the importance of a child’s first years of life, of the fear of abandonment that they can leave for the rest of someone’s life. If he stops to think about Sasha crying in a small cradle, he sometimes can feel his asthma still grasping his lungs.
Then, one day, she stopped. Bucky said he’d felt somehow relieved. Steve remembers that conversation, in Dr Raynor’s office.
“Relieved how?” she asked Bucky.
Steve will never forget Bucky’s haunted eyes, how he looked at Steve like he was about to confess a sin, the most unforgivable one.
“I hoped she’d died. I hoped someone’d had mercy on her, and decided to spare her from all that suffering. The Soldier knew it. I knew it. It wasn’t a place for a child. But no one was kind enough for that. So they gave her to the Soldier to train, to shape and build…she was so little still. I loved her the only way I knew how. I trained her, I made her strong, and fearless, and obedient. I made her into what they wanted her to become. She was just a kid. She still is.”
Dr Raynor is a very attentive woman with her words, and Steve likes her for that. That day, her tone was very precise and simple.
“I argue, instead, that you were just trying to protect her, as you said, the only way you knew how. By ensuring she was safe from punishment. You too were a victim of the situation, and yet you tried to make sure Sasha was spared from the pain they were inflicting you. Of course, that wasn’t always possible. But the blame isn’t on your shoulders, James. You were just a father, shielding your child from a horrific situation. You may not be Sasha’s biological father, but, and I think Steve will agree with me on this, you are effectively her father, because that’s what fathers do for their children.”
Steve doesn’t remember saying anything at all – too overwhelmed, too scared to say the wrong thing – but he remembers his hand sliding into Bucky’s flesh one, their eyes wet with happy tears, because no matter what, no matter what the Soldier, or Bucky, or anyone else might have hoped, Sasha is alive, and well, and strong, and theirs.
“So how do you cope?” Steve asks now, his face tilting towards Bucky’s hands, his gentle touch.
Bucky scrolls his shoulders, but doesn’t lose his smile. “I trust you,” he replies, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I know you’re strong, I know she’s strong. I trust both of your judgements, I trust you not to take unnecessarily risks. And if it’s still not enough, I trust you’ll let me help you. Be there for you.”
Steve wonders if Bucky can feel the heat in his cheeks, and hear the way his heart is pounding violently in his chest. He’ll never get used to this – Bucky’s tender words on his wounds, this selfless care his best friend – the love of his endless life – reserves for him daily, regardless Bucky’s own demons and worries.
“I don’t deserve you,” Steve confesses.
Bucky grabs his hand, kisses his white knuckles one at a time. “Shush,” he says, “That’s my line, pal.”
They hear the keys clinking first – their building is too old and doesn’t have a lift. A couple of seconds later, the front door’s lock turns and Sasha is there, Bucky’s blank expression, Steve’s colours and sharp face.
She really is their daughter.
“Hey, baby,” Steve says, with a smile. “How was it?”
Sasha doesn’t reply immediately. She slowly takes off her long black coat, then her heavy shoes.
Sasha’s hair is longer that it’s ever been since the day Bucky brought her to the Tower, when she was 9 and not speaking. HYDRA used to keep her hair short, like a little boy, and Steve knows how distressed she gets every time Natasha tells her it’s time to trim the ends. Keeping it long is a way to be a person, a way to cope with a trauma just too big for a child, and Steve will be damned before he lets that ever change.
Sasha sighs, shakes her head and her scowl is so grumpy and sweet. She walks to the couch while Bucky sits straight to let her slide between them.
They both wait patiently. Sasha is very methodic with her words, and people are often confusing for her. She’s missed a childhood of interactions, and love, and care, and normality.
No matter how Steve and Bucky can try and fix it, that loss will never be recovered.
“Boys are so…weird.”
Bucky chuckles quietly, gives Steve an amused look. “Tell me about it.”
Steve is trying to decide what to say. His curiosity is unsettling. “Did it not go well?”
Sasha frowns, crosses her arms. She looks like she’s trying to make sense of it.
Steve thinks she’s the cutest thing he’s ever seen.
“It went okay, I think.” Sasha says then.
Bucky is toying with a strand of her hair, moves it behind her ear.
“He talked so much. About films, and about school, and about music, and about his family, and his sister, and his dog.”
“Did he ask you anything about yourself?” Bucky asks her.
Sasha shakes her head furiously, her face a mask of confusion and grumpiness. “No. He didn’t. He was so boring. And then he got annoyed I beat him at bowling, and he tried to hide the fact he was annoyed because he said that girls can be good at sports and it’s not like bowling is a real sport anyway.”
Steve lets out an incredible laugh. “He said that?”
Sasha nods vehemently.
“What a dickhead,” Bucky comments.
Sasha finally turns to look up at Steve.
From this close, he can see each one of the freckles on her nose and cheeks, her deep blue eyes, the tiny mole on the outline of her top lip. Steve smiles at her warmly, his chest full of something just too big to name.
“Tony did say he was a weirdo. I should have just listened to him.”
Bucky frowns comically, looks at Steve who feels just as lost.
“Stark told you your date was a weirdo?” Bucky asks, and Sasha turns to look at him, nodding.
Bucky’s frown deepens. “How the hell does he know?”
Sasha scrolls her shoulders, considering. She moves backward, resting her head on Steve’s chest. Steve’s arm hugs her close, he leaves a small kiss on the crown of her head.
“I think Peter told him,” Sasha says, then. “He never liked Harris. He said he looks like a wonky carrot...whatever that means.”
Bucky’s smile is smart and audacious. He steals a glance at Steve, then looks down at Sasha. “Peter? You mean Parker, right?”
“How many Peters do you know?” Sasha replies immediately, a bit harsher than Steve expected.
Bucky’s smile widens. “Ouch. Alright. Sore point.”
Steve chuckles quietly, feeling Sasha tensing in his arms.
“Papa,” she says. “Shut up.”
“I think what Papa is trying to say,” Steve tells her patiently, looking at Bucky’s open face. “Is that you and Peter seem quite close.”
“We’ve already had this conversation,” Sasha rolls her eyes. “I’ve just been on a date. With another guy. I don’t like Peter.”
Her tone is stubborn like Steve’s used to be when he was her age. He thinks that must be his favourite thing regarding having a daughter who is biologically his but was raised half of her life only by Bucky. To spot himself in her, to see where Bucky may be hiding among her scowls and smiles, the way she reacts to news and feelings, to food and music. There is so much of himself and so much in Bucky in Sasha, and yet she’s so different than either of them. Better. Kinder, definitely wiser. Perfect.
“I’m sorry, baby. You know I’m only kidding,” Bucky moves closer, cups her face with his metal fingers.
He’s not really kidding – this conversation has been brought up by few people already. Nat thinks it’s cute, Sam thinks it’s incredibly worrying, Tony bet 50 dollars with Pepper that Sasha and Peter will end up dating before they’re both 18. Pepper bet 100 dollars it’ll happen before they’re both 17 instead.
Steve doesn’t really know what to think of that. If he could pick any guy to date Sasha, Peter will probably be one of his first choices. The kid is nice, funny, loyal and incredibly smart. He’s also Spider-Man, though. That means risks, and fear, and danger, and pain, and death, and—
“Dad?”
Steve looks down, startled. Sasha is staring at him with concerned eyes. He smiles at her, moves a lock behind her ear.
“I’m sorry, baby. What did you say?”
“Can you make hot cocoa? I’m not really tired. Please.”
Bucky moves to stand up. “I’m on it.”
“No!”
Both Steve and Sasha launch forward, arms raised like they’re physically about to stop Bucky, who’s frozen on his spot, a confused look on his face. He stares at their guilty eyes for a couple of seconds, then his mouth opens comically, nodding slowly.
“Oh...I see. My hot cocoa sucks, doesn’t it?” he says, with a daring tone.
Steve would love to reassure him, and say that’s not true, that he’s just happy to leave them on the couch and take care of it…but that would be a lie.
Because Bucky’s hot cocoa really does suck.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” Sasha says, but she doesn’t sound very apologetic.
Steve stands up as Bucky sits down again. He mouths a quick “I’m sorry” and heads to the kitchen.
He can hear Bucky’s voice whilst warming the milk on the stove.
“You sure everything is okay? Was this kid just boring?”
Steve can’t hear Sasha’s reply, but knows her well enough to picture her nodding.
“You know you can tell us everything, right?” Bucky says. “And I mean everything. Dad and I know you can look after yourself, but we’re here, okay? We always will be.”
“I know, Papa,” Sasha murmur in Russian, like she does when feelings are a bit too much for her.
Steve licks his lips, opens the cupboard to take out their three mugs. He listens to their silence while working in the kitchen, takes a moment to let his heart beat fast in his chest.
Sometimes he wonders about the things he wouldn’t do for his family. He never finds anything. Nothing at all.
It’s a scary thought; to know he’d set the world on fire if it meant they could both be safe. It’s not a thought he’s proud of, but neither it’s a thought he’s ashamed for.
A few minutes later, Sasha speaks again.
“I saw him. At the window. He was waiting for us, right?”
Steve bites a smile, shaking his head. His girl is so smart.
“I told him not to, but you know how Dad is. He can’t help be embarrassing sometimes.”
Steve turns off the stove, whisks the cocoa with the milk until the powder is gone.
“I didn’t mind,” he hears Sasha says. “I told Harris that Dad was at the window. I didn’t want him to kiss me. He freaked out so much I thought he was going to faint.”
“Well, I thought Dad was going to faint,” Bucky says. “I’m sure next time he will at least be more subtle.”
“I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Dating is a lot of efforts.”
“Dad will be happy to know that.”
Another day, Steve and Bucky will sit down with Sasha and have another conversation on consent, on the importance to say ‘no’ in any situation she wants. A conversation similar to the one they had when she was 12 and wouldn’t feel comfortable telling them she felt poorly every time they’d watch a certain children tv show. Too many triggers, too many emotions.
They’ll talk to her on how she doesn’t need to make up excuses, or look for different options so that a guy will not kiss her, and that she can instead simply say that she doesn’t want to be kissed, that she doesn’t have to be kissed. They’ll try to explain consent to her once again, trying not to relieve the trauma of a childhood where consent simply wasn't an option.
Steve is not a particularly religious person anymore – however, he does pray for whoever may try to force a touch or a kiss against his daughter’s wish. He’ll know where to find them.
But tonight, Sasha can go to sleep knowing her Dad will always be there when she wants to say no but can’t find the words for it.
Steve hopes she’ll always feel this safe.
Both him and Buck will sure try their hardest.