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Bucky spotted red hair through the exiting crowd and hoped it was Natasha before he could even see her properly. She was having to fight everyone else like a fish swimming upstream to get to him.
“Ms. Romanova,” he greeted when she emerged and he saw he had predicted correctly. He hadn’t seen her in the courtroom in several days, but it didn’t mean she hadn’t been there. He had tried not to look around too much. Too many people supported the extended Schmidt family.
“Natasha, please,” she replied with a smile. “Congratulations.”
Bucky smiled a small, happy thing.
“Thank you. I have no idea what I’m doing, but thank you.”
His lawyer, Matt Murdock, closed his briefcase and turned toward the two talking to each other in the buzzing courtroom.
“Of course you know,” he told Bucky. “You’re protecting and providing for a little girl just like you did when it mattered most.”
Bucky glanced down to his feet. Kobik wasn’t in the courtroom. She was with the social worker who had been assigned to her when she was still in the hospital several months ago.
“Do I just go pick her up now?”
“Go pick up your daughter, James,” Matt told him. “I’m sure she’s waiting for her dad.”
When Bucky looked up, Matt was smiling at him and Natasha extended a hand.
Daughter. Dad.
Sure, Bucky had just spent weeks in court fighting for those exact words, but it felt surreal now that he had achieved them.
“Go with me?” he asked Matt and Natasha.
“Of course,” Matt replied. “And if you’re up to it, Foggy and I would like to take you to dinner tonight in celebration.”
Bucky considered that.
“Only if our rescue team can go too.”
Matt grinned his boyish smile.
“Anybody you want.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Bucky left his entire support team behind him as he went by himself to where a social worker had kindly been keeping Kobik every day during the trial.
She was four years old now and Bucky only got to see her once a week. By law, she was an orphan twice over when she lost her adoptive father and elder sister the year before. Bucky had only had to fight the extended Schmidt family when it was discovered there actually had been a considerable sum of the family’s money left to her.
“I don’t want the money,” Bucky had told Matt and Foggy the day he met with the lawyers. “I want Kobik to have someone who will love her and be there for her and not just ship her off to boarding school.”
As predicted, the extended Schmidt family didn’t care for the tiny heiress. She wasn’t a blood relative and she wasn’t taking their money. That’s what they really took Bucky to court over. He wanted the little girl and they were afraid it meant he and Kobik would inherit their family money and assets by default. There had been no will, as Bucky predicted, but he had negotiated through the Nelson and Murdock’s law firm that he wanted Kobik, and would happily depart with any fortune to have her. The state of New York then had to decide if Bucky had the right to dispense of Kobik’s claim to a fortune. If, in the end, Kobik got the money, the extended family wanted her with them. Bucky had had to spend weeks in court fighting over each tiny scrap of Kobik.
Bucky had held onto her tiny body adrift in the ocean. He had caught precious drops of rain water in his hands to bring to her parched lips. He had ripped strips of fabric to tie tarpaulin to her body to keep her from burning in the sun. He had watched sharks circle their inflatable raft and held her close so she would feel protected from them despite knowing it wouldn’t stop any of them if they decided they were hungry. He had curled up with her in his arms in the middle of the vast sea and apologized again and again that he couldn’t do more to save her.
Sitting through weeks of a legal battle was nothing.
Bucky knocked on the door where the service worker was sitting and watching Kobik play with colorful building blocks.
The lady smiled, evidently already aware he was coming.
“Kobik,” she said when she opened the door to Bucky, “Are you ready to go home with your daddy?”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
“Thanks for this,” Bucky said as he and Kobik ate pizza from Stanley’s Pizza take out boxes that evening. The press had been everywhere from the courthouse to their apartment. Getting inside had been enough. They’d decided against trying to go to dinner anywhere and instead settled for pizza delivered to the door.
“You keep eating pizza, you’re gonna get even taller,” Sam told Kobik. “And you’re already so tall from that little girl we rescued on the boat.”
Kobik took another giant bite of cheese pizza accompanied by a chomping sound.
“Uh oh,” Steve laughed. “She keeps that up, she’s gonna be so tall we won’t even recognize her.”
Kobik hurried to chomp another bite for him too.
Kobik put her arm up as high as her little limb would reach.
“Gonna be thiiiiis tall!” she announced to both of them. “Taller than you and you!” she said, pointing to each of them.
“Wow! And when you’re that tall,” Natasha chimed in, “You’re going to have to carry your Buckaroo around instead.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
Carrying her down the street became a trial. Not because she was any taller, just because of the hounding of from the press. The new duo couldn’t go to lunch or the park or the library without cameras flashing in their faces and some journalist trying to find out how their life was now. Someone took pictures of Kobik through the fence of her school’s playground. Flashes often were still disrupting their vision even after they got away. Fifteen minutes of fame sucked, Bucky thought. He couldn’t wait till it was over.
“Buckaroo?” Kobik asked one day after he had carried her with her jacket hood over her face to shield her from paparazzi pictures.
“Hmm?”
“Why won’t they leave us alone ever?”
And Bucky’s heart broke.
He bent down on her level and looked at her.
“Do you want to go somewhere where they aren’t always trying to take our picture or yell questions at us?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, sometimes I do too, Koko. I’ll see if I can find us somewhere else.”
—⍟-⍟-⍟—
That same week, Bucky and Kobik came home to their apartment to find a journalist waiting for them at their kitchen table.
“I have to go somewhere where I’m the only one with a set of keys,” he said to Natasha when he told her they were moving. “No landlord. No maintenance crew. Nobody else. I have family back in Indiana. Might try that.”
Natasha hesitated before she said over the phone line, “Never gonna get that date, am I?”
Bucky’s heart ached. A part of him really would have loved to be the guy who could laugh everything off and take Natasha out for a nice dinner, but he knew he wasn’t that guy anymore. He’d probably never be him again.
“It’s not because I don’t want to,” Bucky told her. “I just can’t-“
“I know. You have other priorities now.”
Bucky didn’t deny it.
“I never meant to gain a kid through this. I took a summer job captaining a small yacht for a wealthy family. It was supposed to be good money and I needed that. The rest of this- the trauma, the toddler, the further trauma- none of that is anything I could have foreseen. But I’m here now, you know?”
“Guess some things are meant to be and others aren’t,” Natasha said, voice trying for neutral, but just missing the mark.
“For what it’s worth,” Bucky said, “I’m glad I met you and I can never thank you enough for what you and Steve and Sam have done for me.”
Natasha’s voice sounded more self-assured again when she responded, “Yeah, you are pretty lucky, I guess. We’re great people to know.”
“That you are. I’ll email you when we’re settled,” Bucky told her. “Just so you know we landed okay.”
“I appreciate it. And, Barnes, just because accidents and happenstance got you here and just because it isn’t working out the way we would have hoped, doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re going to be a really good dad and have a wonderful life.”
Bucky wanted to say something stupid like, “Wish you were gonna be there for it,” or something sentimental like, “It won’t be as wonderful without you,” but all he said was, “Thank you. I’ll do my best.” And a minute or so later, he hung up the phone.