Plums| B. Barnes

~Remembering Ivory Lee~

"So...What's gonna happen to your friends?" Bucky asks.

"Whatever it is... I'll deal with it." Steve replies.

"I don't know if I'm worth all this Steve..."

"What you did all those years, it wasn't you. You didn't have a choice."

"I know... but I did it." He says with a sigh. "Ivory would never want to see me again if she saw me like that..."

"I'm sure that's not true..."

"She doesn't know the real me..."

"Buck, the 'REAL' you is the man who spent her whole life taking care of her...not the other guy."

"I don't think you understand...just the idea of knowing that I became the soldier even in the same building as her terrifies me. I know she didn't see anything, but as the man who raised her, it's scary to think I wasn't far from her while I was the winter soldier...I'm just scared she'll see me like that one day, and she'll live in fear of me...I always have been scared of her seeing me like that."

"Buck, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot." Bucky says.

"So...how exactly did you take care of Ivory for so long?"

"I wish I could tell you...I honestly don't know." He says shrugging his shoulders.

"Looking back, I was pretty unstable for most of her first year..."

~~~~~Flash back~~~~~

Thursday
October 9, 2014
11:47 PM

"Are you done?" Bucky asks Ivory who had been laid in her stroller screaming and crying.

"This is seriously getting out of control...you've been up for over 14 hours with no nap, you need to go to sleep..." Bucky says watching as Ivory combatively kicked her feet and flailed her arms around in every possible direction. By now the girl was having a tantrum and Bucky was over it.

For two weeks straight, Ivory had been refusing naps and getting very minimal sleep overnight and it was driving Bucky insane. He was almost at his wits end with the baby.

"We'll maybe if you would stop your nap strike you wouldn't be so cranky, at almost midnight..." he says to himself panicking, pacing back and forth across the apartment trying to think of ways to stop Ivory's crying.

Bucky sighed to himself and took Ivory out of the stroller and cradled her in his arms and little to his surprise, she continued to scream and cry even louder.  Bucky sat down on the sofa with Ivory unsure of what else could be done.

At this point there was really nothing Bucky could do for the girl, she was too far gone.

~~~~~

"She would really cry all night long?"

"Oh yeah, and she wouldn't stop...no matter what I did, I couldn't make her happy, and because of the state I was in I almost hated myself most days because I couldn't do anything to soothe her..." Bucky explained.

"The parenting books I read called it the '4 month sleep regression', but to this day, I still like to think it was colic that made her act like that for so long..."