girl ― saved by captain america

[twenty eight] he's my friend

[Steve]

"...he said his name was Bucky."

Ever since Willa spoke those words yesterday, I've been unable to shake them from my mind. In the moment, I decided not to tell the little girl that I knew the only other person in the world she's ever loved, that he was my best friend, and that I knew exactly why he turned evil. Even though my first instinct was to defend Buck and tell her that he didn't choose to betray her, something within myself stopped me. It had already been such an eventful day for her, for all of us. Starting on about Bucky felt like a whole new can of worms that I didn't think I could open in that moment. Bruce had sent me a look of surprise in regards to my silence. Thankfully, though, he didn't push anything further than that.

Glancing at the clock, I see that it's only a few minutes past 7:00am. Sitting on the edge of my bed as the warmth of the rising sun falls on my back through the window behind me, I pick up my cellphone from my nightstand, unlocking it with my thumb and swiping it open. I pull up my contacts list, and he's the very first name, right at the top.

Bucky.

Before I can change my mind, I've tapped his number, hitting the call button. As I raise the phone gently to the side of my face, it only rings once before he answers, his voice sounding rough. "Steve?"

"Hey Buck," I say softly, not knowing how to start the conversation. "Sorry if I woke you."

"It's alright. I don't do much sleeping anymore," he admits, his soft smile audile through his voice.

"Yeah, I guess I don't either," I chuckle lightly. "How've you been?"

"Oh, you know. I've been... managing." We both know there's so much more underneath that statement, but I don't want to push him. When he needs to talk, he comes to me. When he wants to say more, he knows he can. In the meantime, I know that prying just feels overbearing to him. So I take his answer of 'managing.' Even though I know it's probably the whole story.

"That's good, I'm glad," I tell him, trying to look past his avoidance. "Hey, listen. I've been meaning to talk to you about something. I'm sorry we haven't talked in the past few weeks. Things have just been really- I don't know... crazy."

"Don't worry about it; I'm sure being an Avenger doesn't leave much room in your schedule for phone dates," the man laughs it off. "What's been going on?"

"Well- god. I don't even know where to start," I groan as I run a hand over my face. "Our last big mission was to Seoul. We raided another Hydra base, took down a lot of big guys." Bucky hums in approval at this. "We also rescued several prisoners. The usual; people Hydra had used to-... people they had trained." I know that Bucky can handle the words I'm saying to him; I've said them to him many times before. It just always feels hard to talk about these things with him, knowing what he went through. "And we... we found one prisoner in particular. A little girl. And she was... in really bad shape." Bucky is quiet, patiently waiting as I try to pull myself together. "We were able to find out a lot about her on the ship. She's five, had lived with Hydra her whole life. She has a special set of healing powers they were particularly interested in."

"Steve," Bucky interrupts quietly, signaling that the recognition must have hit him sooner than I thought it might. "Oh my god. Are you... are you talking about the girl?"

"We call her Willa now," I breathe, smiling through the tears that've built up in my eyes. "We figured it was only right to give her a name. She's been with us ever since we rescued her weeks ago. As soon as I found her, I- I knew she belonged with us. With me. I took over guardianship, Buck," I reveal, relieved to finally be getting this all off of my chest.