#i bought a black widow and can confirm it is sick | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

barnesandco · 3 years

Text

Little Hands (II)

Series Masterlist

You, Bucky, and Anastasia pay Bruce Banner a visit.

This is an entry for @star-spangled-bingo 2021. Word count: 1836. Square filled: “You don’t wanna know.”

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Reader

Warnings: More Sad Child. Needles, fear of. So much overthinking.

A/N: Gosh, I’m so glad I got this chapter edited in time. I hope you like it and I’m sorry for skipping out on y’all last week! To make up for it, there’ll be two updates this weekend, so look out for the next chapter tomorrow! Lmk what you thinkkkk

The Avengers Compound is every bit as spectacular as you could have possibly hoped, and yet you’re unable to fully appreciate it because of the sheer absurdity of the situation. Your hand is in the vice-tight grip of the supposed daughter of your neighbor, who happens to be an Avenger.

Said neighbor is pacing back and forth in front of you as you sit in Bruce Banner’s laboratory, with Anastasia beside you while you wait for Bruce to arrive. Ana is remarkably calm, her young features – the round cheeks, still-wet eyes – made mature by her abnormal silence. Something about her makes you think she’s used to this kind of tension. Something about her screams war-child. Perhaps this grip she has on you is the first demand she has made in a long time, the only tantrum she has ever been allowed to throw.

While you aren’t particularly experienced with children, you think you want her to feel safe with you, because it seems she hasn’t been elsewhere. Ana’s eyes flit around the room in the only behavioral indication of her youth – a childlike curiosity, shining in the face of this fancy, new place that gleams like a toy store. Every now and then, her gaze jumps back from the alien appearance of the lab to her father (?) who seems intent on wearing a hole in the tiles with his pacing.

It is beginning to wear on you: both Bucky’s pacing and Ana’s steadily increasing anxiety. He hasn’t said a word to her since he opened the envelope, only asked that you accompany him to the Compound seeing as Ana won’t go alone with him (You would have gone with him even if that hadn’t been so. Though the nature of your relationship is ambiguous at times, the strength of your friendship is not. You’ll figure this out. You won’t leave him alone). Clearly, there is some unspoken memory that has him convinced the claim in the letter is plausible. Neither of you would be here if it wasn’t.

Bucky doesn’t talk too much about his past. He has offered a few of the shattered shards of his past reflection to you in the few night-caped moments you have hammered on his door upon hearing shouts across the hall. Between that, and what you know thanks to Black Widow’s file dump, the big Avengers’ in-fight in Europe last summer, the consequent resolution to the Accords, and Bucky’s publicized pardon, you can guess at the traumas that lurk in the depths of him.

They’re traumas that are closer to the surface of his eyes now, pulled forth by this new life, this little soul that has no business with such dark things, and the implication that this holds. Ana, innocent as she may be, is an insinuation of what else might have been unwillingly torn from Bucky.

You don’t want to think about it, because it hurts to do so, because you care for him, in many, many ways. It seems that Anastasia is also starting to tire of it. With every step Bucky takes, her hand tightens on yours. Fortunately, soon, the door to your left opens, and Bruce Banner enters his lab.

He's appropriately disheveled for this hour in the morning. Under his pristine lab coat, one of his shirt buttons is done into the wrong buttonhole, but his eyes are alert, frantic even, though you get the feeling that this is a man always on the edge of escape.

Bucky lets out a breath he seems to have been holding at the same time as his shoulders tense. “Thanks for coming so early, Doctor Banner. I wouldn’t have called if—”

“You never call, so I know it must have been important. But it looks like I’ve kept you waiting anyways,” Banner says, his eyes widening as they move from Bucky, to you, to the little girl at your side. “What’s the matter? You know I’m not a medical doctor, right?” He asks, putting a work bench between himself and his visitors.

Bucky clears his throat, and doesn’t quite know how to say what he needs to. After a few more seconds of hesitation, in which Banner waits patiently, Bucky extracts the envelope containing the fateful letter from his pocket, and hands it over.

The furrows in Doctor Banner’s brow multiply spontaneously, and when he looks up, Bucky gestures with a subtle nod of his head to Ana. He has yet to explain your presence, but you think Doctor Banner is a smart man. It won’t take more than Anastasia’s tight hold on you for him to put two and two together. Sometimes, a scared child is just that, no matter how unusual.

Most of their ensuing conversation is held at a lowered volume, set by Bucky, probably out of courtesy for Ana. You can hear snatches and phrases, most of them confirmations of things you had expected and some, not so much. Lobby security cam footage… fingerprints… paternity test… serum… blood sample…

By the end of it, some facsimile of a plan seems to have evolved between the two men, because Doctor Banner turns away with a smile and you, taking it as a welcome, stand and approach him. He rounds his desk and shakes your hand, exchange introductions though he hardly needs one, and then, he crouches, the way Bucky had, and offers Ana his hand.

“Hi, I’m Bruce.”

“Ana.”

Bucky steps forward. “Anastasia—” the name is clumsy on his tongue, because he’s scared. You can see it, and you hope he knows you are, too, but you’ll stand with him regardless, “—Bruce is going to check that you aren’t sick.”

“I’m okay.”

“We need to be sure.”

“Okay.”

Banner pulls out a chair, and you’re about to sit Ana down on it, when she pushes you gently into it, and sits on your lap. You can do nothing but wrap your arms gently around her, so she doesn’t fall. The apology in Bucky’s eyes is melted with a sympathetic smile. It’s alright. A child developing an inexplicable affection for you is not the worst thing to ever happen to you.

Ana is warm and a comfortable weight on you, and you hold her as loosely as you can, feel the movement of her chest against your arms with each breath. Her hair is a mix of wool-thick and silk-soft against your chin, smelling faintly of the sugar-sweet strawberry scent found in children’s shampoos. Someone took care of her.

Someone she isn’t asking for. What kind of child doesn’t ask for their mother, past the initial, momentary heartbreak? How has she come to terms with the apparent change in custody, when the new custodian hasn’t?

Whether Bucky is to be the new guardian has yet to be determined. You can see Bruce pulling out a syringe and preparing a vial. You wonder if she’s scared of needles. Bucky flinches at the sight of them, even now. He’s said that his disdain for the cold clinicism of medicine dates back to long before Hydra. Medical equipment reminds him of worrying that his best friend was going to die. It’s the fear he has harbored longest, longer than his fear of war, of gunshots in the dark, of blood on his hands.

Ana shares it. When she sees the needle, she screams, and Bucky lunges forward to help you hold her in place. She’s so, so much stronger than you thought and while you can hold her limbs, her head thrashes about, and so does her torso, making it impossible for Bruce to get to the inside of her elbow.

In the chaos, your eye lands on a trinket on a nearby desk, sitting there like a peace offering, literally beckoning to you. “Hey, Ana,” you whisper-yell, trying not to get hit in the jaw by her head. “Do you like animals? Cats? I have a friend who has lots and lots of cats, and I could take you to see them.” It’s working. You’re out of breath, but she’s quieting. Most little kids love cats. You love cats. “I think Bruce has a toy cat. See, over there?” You dare to lift an arm to point at the maneki-neko on the table. Ana stills. Her eyes follow the hypnotic movement, and the syringe at Ana’s elbow does its job.

When the bandage is put on, you and Bucky let go with twin nervous chuckles of relief and disbelief, and Bruce puts the vial in a machine. Ana hops off to approach the desk, and bats at the paw waving at her like a mirror of it.

“We should have the results soon. I think the others are starting to wake up, if you want to say hi,” Bruce says, taking off his glasses and wiping them on the corner of his lab coat.

“Maybe later,” you say, seeing that Bucky is hardly in any position to converse casually with his teammates right now. Not to mention, it’d be a lot of work to explain Ana, especially before having any sort of confirmation of who she is.

Bucky pulls out a chair next to you while Bruce opens a laptop a few counters away, and an x-ray machine lifts its head behind Ana, who has moved on from the lucky cat, and is stroking the leaves of a flowering plant.

“Peace lily,” Bucky says, startling you. You look at him, the bags under his eyes, the way he almost looks his age right now, and fight the urge to hold his hand. “It’s the first flower I bought for my apartment. I put it in a community garden after a nightmare about the war. Didn’t feel right for me to have it.”

He's talking about the Second World War. The war always refers to his first war. You think he’s talking about peace, and not the lily, after what he’s done. After what he was forced to do.

“It’s not your fault,” is an automatic response, and never enough, especially for the war, because at least he was in his own senses, even if he was drafted. It always elicits a self-deprecating laugh, but right now, he’s too tired for even that.

Right now, he can only watch as the x-ray camera follows Ana around the room, from the peace lilies, to an Amazon elephant’s ear, to a strange sculpture made from Coca-Cola cans glued together by what looks like spider-webs.

Too soon, Bruce calls you over to his work station. You follow Bucky, one eye on Ana.

“She’s yours,” Bruce says, and Bucky inhales sharply. Now, you do take his hand, stroke the metal ridges with your calloused thumb. “But she has disproportionately more of your DNA than her mother’s.”

“What does that mean?”

Bruce wrings his hands. “She’s not a complete clone, but nearly a genetic copy. 80% of a clone, if you will.”

Bucky is growing increasingly uncomfortable, shifting next to you. “How’s that possible?”

“You don’t wanna know.”

#SSB2021 #bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes x y/n #bucky barnes fanfic #reader insert #fanfiction #marvel fanfiction #marvel fanfic #marvel #mcu #fanfic

128 notes · View notes