Chapter Text
Bucky Barnes knew when he was being watched.
He wouldn’t have lived very long if he didn’t.
He knew, intimately, that feeling, crawling along the back of his neck, and up his spine: that feeling of unseen eyes being on him. That sensation had been with him for decades, from his time as a green sergeant in Italy, to his experience as a Howling Commando, through his years as the Winter Soldier, and beyond.
The streets of New York were crowded, but he’d tracked and been tracked through crowds before. Yet he saw nothing.
The fact that he hadn’t spotted them, whoever they were, first; indeed, hadn’t yet been able to spot them at all, was ominous.
Whoever was watching him now, he thought as he narrowed his eyes, was very, very good.
He’d been prowling the streets of New York for days now, trying to find anyone who might know something about the kid he and Sam had taken into their care. Surely someone, somewhere, knew her, knew something about her. Wanted her back.
“You do know I’m not a child therapist, right?” Dr. Raynor had groused at Bucky when she’d first arrived at Sam’s place in the Meatpacking District. “I work with individuals with PTSD.”
“Sorry, Doc,” he’d told her honestly. “We were fresh out of ideas.”
“Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, talk to the kid for a bit? See if you can get any answers?” Sam had pleaded.
Raynor had given a heavy sigh. “Yeah, I got the briefing from Ross. What a mess.”
Seeing Bucky open his mouth to protest, she had quickly held up her hand.
“Not that I agree with anything he did, mind you. But I don’t agree with the two of you walking off with her, either. She’s a child, not a box of office supplies.”
She had glanced at the child, who was still sitting at the dining room table, and currently happily scribbling on the back of some envelopes Sam had given her.
Now that she was free from the doctors who’d held her, Shock had seemed to be behaving more like an ordinary child. She’d slung the oversized, bandaged arm on top of the table, using its weight to hold down the paper so it didn’t shift while she drew.
Bucky had marveled again at how little that deformity, or what ever it was, seemed to bother the child. But then again, he had thought to himself, couldn’t a person get used to anything eventually? The Soviets and Hydra had never given him the time to process the loss of his arm (“traumatic amputation,” his medical records called it) and he’d had so many prosthetics over the years he didn’t think about them as anything other than another tool, like a gun or a knife. True, he still avoided looking at or touching the stump of where his real arm had been, but that was more about avoiding the memories of pain caused by Hydra’s experiments, not from the trauma of the fall itself.
It figured, he had thought to himself, that this little five-year-old kid was better adjusted than he was at twenty times her age.
Raynor had continued to protest for a while before finally grumbling, “Lucky for you two I’ve got grandkids” as she took a seat next to Shock.
Bucky hadn’t known she had grandkids. Raynor’s office, other than the gloomy forest mural, had been dull and anonymous, no personal artefacts anywhere to be seen. Wait, had he been supposed to ask her about her own life? Or would she have considered that a breech of professionalism? Like so much etiquette in this new and strange world he was living in, he had no damn idea.
Raynor had sat with the child for a while, there in Sam’s loft, while Bucky and Sam had drunk coffee in Sam’s kitchenette and pretended not to be eavesdropping. The little girl was quiet at first, just answering Raynor with “yes” and “no,” but she soon seemed to warm up and finally chattered with the doctor quite happily.
“I don’t feel comfortable providing any kind of diagnosis under the circumstances,” Raynor had told them afterwards once Shock has returned to her art project. “It’s clear that whoever she is, wherever she came from, that she’s been through a lot.”
The older woman had sighed heavily. “I can’t hold off Ross indefinitely. She’s a minor and for all intents and purposes a de facto ward of the state. If he wants her in his custody I don’t have the kind of pull to prevent it. But it’s also clear she’s scared to death of being taken back to the hospital, which of course she would be. I’ll pull as many strings as I can. I can probably get you a week.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Sam had told her. “We really appreciate anything you can do.”
She had glanced from Sam to Bucky and back again.
”For whatever reason, that little girl trusts the two of you,” she said pointedly. “Don’t screw this up.”
Don’t screw this up.
Bucky was still thinking about Raynor’s warning when his phone rang. He stepped to one side to let the crowds pass and answered it.
“Any luck?” Sam’s voice asked in his ear.
“No. I’m about ready to start wearing a sandwich board with bright red letters asking, “Is anyone is missing a mysterious kid.’ How about you?”
“Wong says there’s still no sign of Strange, or of when he will be back. He insists he doesn’t know anything about what Strange did in the vergence, or who he might have brought back with him, or if Shock was among them. Although on that last one he doesn’t think Strange would deliberately involve a kid.”
“I’d hope not,” Bucky agreed.
“But, man, you’d think the dude would leave some notes before taking off. Like, ‘Oh, here’s some superheroes from a parallel universe. Here’s what you might need to know.”
“Like an instruction manual.”
“Right? Exactly.”
Bucky shrugged, even though he knew Sam wouldn’t be able to see it. “Maybe she really is from here and we’ve gone down the wrong rabbit hole.”
“Nah, she’d have to have left some kind of record behind her here if that was the case. A birth record, at least. And there’s no way a kid with that kind of ability to hurt people would have been able to stay off SWORD’s and Ross’ radar.”
“She didn’t hurt those cops on purpose, Sam,” Bucky reminded him. He still got a strange feeling in his chest every time he thought of that video they’d seen in the hospital, of the terrified little girl and the adults looming over her like shadows…
“I know that, Buck.” Sam had gentled his voice a bit. “She’s a good kid. She really is. But that doesn’t change the fact she has abilities we can’t begin to understand. Hopefully, wherever she came from, her Granny maybe, whoever that is, had a handle on it. “Cause she’s different. Not bad-different, or even good-different. Just different. And that can be rough for a kid. You know?”
Bucky thought of Steve for a moment. Not of Captain America-Steve, with the muscles and the shield, but of scrawny Steve Rogers. The kid who’d had asthma so bad he couldn’t keep up with the other kids on the playground, and who’d always preferred drawing to stickball. The Steve who, though no fault of his own, had been the punching bag for every bully in Brooklyn.
“Yeah, I know,” Bucky now said.
“There’s another reason I called. Since you’re not having any luck finding these superheroes-who-maybe-aren’t-superheroes-but-who-maybe-are…”
“Oh, they’re around, Sam,” he interrupted his friend. “They’re watching us, or one of them is, but for some reason they’re choosing not to come forward.”
“They’re probably as nervous about us as we are about them. Or him. Or her. Whatever,” Sam said reasonably. “No, I have a shopping list for you from Mrs. Cathy. Drugstore stuff, mostly.”
“Of course you do.”
Bucky hated shopping. He always had, although as a young man he’d had his mother and sisters to rely on for most of it. And of course the Winter Soldier had never needed to go shopping. Now he mainly stuck to corner bodegas for food, because the selection was small enough not to overwhelm him and nobody cared if he wandered around in confusion for a bit. Plus they often had cats. Bucky liked cats.
Drugstores, however, were a whole other minefield. Why Americans in the twenty-first century felt the need to have twenty different kinds of toothpaste to choose from, and almost as many brands of toilet paper, he’d never know. Plus they seemed to be disproportionately staffed with women. He couldn’t think of anything more humiliating than having to ask a woman for help choosing hand soap or something. Fortunately, he’s found a drugstore and pharmacy combo near his apartment that, for whatever reason, seemed to have mostly older men as employees. There Bucky could play dumb and ask questions and nobody seemed to mind much. Men weren’t supposed to know about that kind of stuff anyway. That, at least, hadn’t changed much from his day.
Bucky sighed. “Text it to me and I’ll handle it,” he told his friend. “Man, kids sure need a lot of stuff, huh?”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Sam said with a chuckle as he ended the call.
Bucky and Sam had had one bit of unexpected luck in a week full of dead-ends and disappointments. Once John Robinette had been informed that Sam would be, for want of a better word, babysitting a kid for a while, he had immediately suggested his wife Cathy step in to help. Robinette’s wife was a retired teacher, and, at least according to her husband, had too much time on her hands just now.
“Ever since our youngest grandchild started junior high, Cathy’s been at kind of loose ends. Those kids would rather play soccer with their friends or stare at their phones than hang out with their grandparents anymore,” Robinette had observed good-naturedly. “And she would kick my backside if she heard Captain America needed a hand and I didn’t ask her.”
Sam and Bucky were all too aware that it might look strange to the rest of the world for an unrelated child to be staying with Sam. But they were also wary of putting Mrs. Robinette in any danger.
The woman herself, however, had quickly shunted those concerns aside once she’d arrived, myriad tote bags filled with children’s clothing and prepared meals balanced on each arm.
“Good grief, Sam, I raised three daughters in Spanish Harlem. I managed classrooms full of fifth-graders year after year, for longer than you’ve been alive,” she’d scolded gently. “I can manage one little girl with a strange arm, wherever it is she might have come from.”
And she had. The retired teacher and the little girl had hit it off. “Mrs. Cathy,” as they all had taken to calling her, knew a lot more abut child rearing than Sam and Bucky did, of course. She also knew how to encourage the child to do for herself, so long as Shock had proper adult supervision.
It turned out Shock was quite capable of giving herself a bath, which made her entirely more pleasant to be around. She knew how to brush her hair one-handed; how to set the table; and all her letters and most of her numbers.
“Children like to be able to do for themselves, Sergeant Barnes,” the older woman explained to Bucky. “Makes them feel proud and important. This one may look a little different, but she’s the same on the inside.”
At night Shock and Mrs. Cathy slept in the twin beds in the guest room Sam had been fixing up for his nephews, which gave Sam a break and made Bucky feel a bit less guilty. After all, he was able to retreat every evening to his tiny apartment in Brooklyn.
His phone chimed again, and Bucky glanced down at the list and groaned.
He didn’t recognize half of what was on it. But after a morning spend pounding the pavement with no results, and with the wind off the river starting to whip and blow icy air down the autumn city streets, he was willing to beat a strategic retreat.
For now.
Bucky awoke with a start.
In a fit of optimism a few weeks ago, he’d purchased a proper bed and mattress. They were here, eating up most of the space in the small bedroom. All the sheets and pillows the salesperson had thrown in to sweeten the deal were still in their plastic wrappers, sitting on top of the mattress.
He, himself, was still sleeping on the floor, though. He liked the floor.
So what had woken him?
The television was flickering away across from him, its blueish light formless and shapeless, the sound turned down to a soft burble, just as it always was. Sam had told him about these things called white noise machines, but Bucky hadn’t seen any point in spending money on that when his TV could do the same thing for free.
Without moving he quickly took stock of himself. He hadn’t been having a nightmare, or, if he had, he didn’t now remember it. Plus those usually made him bolt upright in a cold sweat, not just open his eyes to stare at the ceiling, as he was now doing.
The ceiling. That was it. There had been something…had it been movement? Something moving had nudged his sleeping mind into wakefulness.
There didn’t seem to be anything there now.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it. On the stack of books to his left that doubled as a makeshift nightstand.
A card. A small, white card.
He grabbed it and squinted at it in the dim light.
23 Pearl Street, it read. 9am tomorrow.
There was a quick movement, just beyond his field of vision. Like a smear, like a shadow. Close to the ceiling and just above his front door.
Without thinking he leapt to his feet and ran for the door, glad he at least had on his boxer briefs. He yanked off the deadbolt and charged through it, just in time to see the shadow—no, it was more like smoke, now he could see a bit better with the floor-level security lights of the hallway on, but not like any smoke he’d ever seen—reach the window at the end of the hall and disappear.
Bucky ran to the window and threw it open.
There was nothing except the cold wind, blowing in, and an even colder-looking crescent moon hanging in the black sky above.
Fortunately the other four doors in his wing of the building all remained closed. If it—whatever it was—had visited them too they’d all managed to sleep through it.
Bucky’s building was an old one, probably almost as old as he was, but it had been retrofitted for safety at some point. He had a fire escape off his living room window, but there wasn’t one on this end of the building. This window went nowhere, and they were eight floors up.
Bucky took a deep breath of the cold air, and shivered, remembering abruptly that he was clad in only his skivvies.
“What in the actual hell?” He observed aloud to no one in particular.