Secretive - Bucky Barnes

9 || Coming Back

Days, weeks, months pass and nothing changes. At least, not concerning the daily rhythm Hydra thought fitting for me.

I did not get to get out anymore. After I tricked them a second time soon after the first, they would not rely on me to do their dirty work outside their walls.

It is still waking up early, and since the twins were born, right after the poor excuse of a breakfast, there is the blood-taking, the training. Depending on how many people they need information from or threatened, I am almost daily busied with torturing, from cutting off limbs to facing certain death for the victim, but in a way that makes them suffer most. Then, late afternoon, another piece of the dusty-paper-tasting dry bread, and that is it. Then helping in the lab or an afternoon with the kids, like I was another of the many, many mothers out there.

Just that I am not. And it is so hard not to let them see.

It started months before their birth in February. They gave me the test perhaps one month later, although I already knew I was pregnant. Fortunately, they were clever enough to set up my nutrition again, so I could give the babies the energy they needed. But I never have been stupid, so I saw behind Hydra's mask made of almost something like niceness. They wanted to use the children against me, wanted to blackmail me because what worse is there for a mother?

  For a brief amount of time, I thought about abortion. Of course, Hydra would not give me the positive test until that time was over, but I knew of the children thanks to Alistair anyways. I am sure I somehow would have managed to get through with it, although Hydra clearly wanted me to get the kids for obvious reasons. They even accepted months of no more gold floating into their cashboxes for the threat they thought it would mean to me.

But I thought of James. Of what he would have wanted, swallowing down the bitter aftertaste thoughts about Steve possibly being the father left. James would not want me to end their lives, even if it meant, in the worst case, that he was alone with the children for years. I am sure of it. I do not know if he would forgive me if I, well, eliminated them from existence. He does a lot, proved his love to me a lot and in immeasurable ways, but I do not think he would ever be able to look me in the eyes again if I decided for him and for me alone. In the end, parents love their kids more than each other, do they not?

It was devastating not to tell him. Devastating to keep all the pictures from the end to now for myself, to not be able to share the special firsts – the first word, the first walk, the first tooth. An eye laughing, one crying for him to miss all the things parenthood made so special. But Hydra would not let me reach out to him, they would not let me contact him and tell him and let him see. I do not know if it was that smart of a move, either; he still had the implant, and he surely would have gone crazy knowing his girlfriend and both his kids were in the organization that screwed his life.

It was easier once they were born. Easier as soon as I saw Rebecca's grey-blue eyes that could be of no one else than James. I would recognize these eyes in a million years from now, and no one could ever take that from me. And with that knowledge, it was easier to accept them as mine.

Although I felt like I never could entirely. I cared for them, and rooted deeply inside me was the natural love a mother carried for their children, but I never fully got along with being a mother itself. Trying my best to cover it; playing with them, feeding them, singing them to sleep, I did the best I could to hide that part of me that was not grown enough for such a task.

And day for day, I knew James would be so much better than I am at this. Given the fact how he cared for his siblings, that he knew how to raise babies throughout all the stages of their growth; he would make the perfect father, I just know it.