Terrified

Running Again

The frantic air that everyone woke up to the next morning was indescribable. It felt as if the world had stopped when Bucky's frantic cries for his girl and his baby were heard throughout the compound. Steve was the first one to wake up having leapt out of his bed when he heard the frantic crying of his brother.

"She's gone! She's gone!" Bucky cried loud enough to wake the rest of the Avengers from their slumbers. Everyone was sure it was Hydra, right up until Tony looked at the security tapes. Steve and Tony approached Bucky slowly, knowing it was going to be the hardest thing they would ever have to tell him.

"Buck," Steve huffed out and Bucky turned to see his friend, tears of fear still in his eyes.

"What is it? Do you know where they are? Was it Hydra?" Bucky fired off each question so fast they almost didn't understand him.

"Barnes it wasn't Hydra," Tony's tone was somber and he couldn't look Bucky in the eyes.

"What do you mean? Who was it?" Bucky began bracing himself to hear that more of Thor's kind had come and taken them for some reason.

"She took the baby," Tony swallowed hard, blinking away the water coming to the surface of his eyes, "and ran." Bucky stopped breathing and he was sure his heart stopped as well.

"No, no, that's, that's impossible, she just, she just had the baby," Bucky tried to reason.

"Yeah," Steve replied, "three weeks ago. Remember she ran from Rumlow only three days after she had given birth to her first daughter." The reminder was not one that Bucky wanted to remember right now. The reminder that she was more than capable of leaving on her own.

"There has to be a way to track her, what car did she take?" Natasha, who was listening quietly behind Bucky, asked.

"She disabled the GPS tracker on the car," Tony answered.

"How? How did she even know how to do that?" Natasha asked. Tony lifted the iPad he was holding and showed Bucky more about the woman he loved but barely knew.

"She was a graduate with honors from MIT. Not only that, but she was Rumlow's girlfriend."

"Yeah we knew that part," Steve reminded.

"Yeah, we did," Tony replied, "but what we didn't know is that she was the one that helped him put fake passports and ID's together for missions. For him and other agents." Tony looked back up at Bucky, "She's gone." Bucky closed his eyes as tears fell from his eyes. She could easily disappear and never return. He may never meet his daughter. He may never hold her again, or listen to her speak.

"But why would she run? She knew she could trust us," Natasha tried to reason. Steve and Tony could only shrug. Bucky looked down at his metal hand, his eyelashes batting at tears that ran down his cheeks freely.

"Me," he said, "She was afraid of me. I saw it in her eyes when she saw me hold our baby. She saw my hand." There was a heaviness in the air as it set in that Amy was afraid of who Bucky used to be and what he was capable of. The air began to shift throughout the day and turned to anger. Angry because after everything that Bucky had done for Amy, she still didn't trust him, or any of them for that matter. Everyone was taking her disappearance personally. Bucky wouldn't let them get angry with her though.

"She's been through enough already," he would remind them, "she was protecting her baby. She'll come back." Bucky would say it like a mantra...for the first year.