Captain America and Bucky Barnes Imagines

99. Girl Meets World

A/N: This was requested last week by enswimmer. It was a really good request that had a lot of great detail in it, so this chapter is a bit long (not my longest, though). I hope I got everything in here that you wanted to see, enswimmer! Let me know what you think :) Thanks again for requesting! And everyone else: thank you for all the votes, reads, comments, and general love! I adore every single one of you endlessly.

Happy Spring!

Winnie

Words: 7K

The bedroom floor creaks as your heavy, weighed-down feet take you towards the door. Arms outstretched to keep yourself from stumbling in the dark; you quietly shuffle towards your escape. You pause in front of your vanity mirror before going out the rest of the way: making sure you're wearing both leg braces properly and that your long blonde hair is pulled back into a clean enough braid. The soft glow from your cell phone screen is suitable enough to find the doorknob and guide you out into the apartment hall.

You have to be quiet. You can't risk your dad waking and hearing you escape... oh lord, he'd have your head if he knew what you were up to right now.

You're thankful for your dad's habit of leaving the kitchen light on as you hobble through the apartment. A crooked picture frame on the wall has you pausing for a moment. Your dad might have his quirks—being overprotective and telling ridiculously cheesy jokes being two of them—but you can't stand seeing anything sitting haphazardly on the wall. So you break away on your path to the front door to straighten the image: smiling as you step back and see that the photograph is now perfectly aligned with the white baseboards down below. The photo itself is one of your favorites: taken by your redheaded Aunt Natty on your fourteenth birthday. You were fitted with braces on your crooked teeth, a wrap-around brace for your bent-spine, and a glucose reader injected into your arm. But despite everything, your family made your birthdays the best of anyone's alive. That year everyone went to Disneyworld to celebrate. You wish you could remember what you said to convince your Uncle Bucky to wear those gaudy, sparkly Minnie Mouse ears...

You step away from the picture and turn towards the door—cringing as your shoe scuffs the floor and makes a godawful noise that screeches through your ear. You freeze—praying that your dad hasn't heard and woken up from his deep slumber—but relax after a moment when all you hear is the hum from the bathroom fan. A sigh leaves your lips.

Out of the apartment you heave a deep breath of relief. A smile dares to cross your red-painted lips. You smooth out the fabric of your clingy t-shirt that rises just high enough on your belly to give your dad a heart attack if he were to see. Your skinny jeans are ripped in all the right places and illustrate your hips and curves to the point that you feel like a real figured-woman in them. You're petite for someone your age, nineteen, and you try not to be bitter about it because it's in your DNA to be small and weak.

It's what they call Pre-Serum Steve Syndrome.

It's almost a joke among your family after all these years. Can't reach something on a high shelf? It's the P.S.S.S. Can't run a few yards without needing your inhaler? Blame it on the P.S.S.S. It's your own way of coping with things, and it's everyone else's way to try to make your dad feel better about unknowingly spawning a child so physically weak. It's not your dad's fault you were born this way: small and fragile like a damn daffodil trying to survive the floods of spring. Hell, he didn't even have anything to do with your birth—not a single thing. It was HYDRA that cooked you up in the belly of a willing participant. Your mother, someone who has no emotional attachments to you and still works for HYDRA today, was a carrier for the science experiment that was meant to cook up Captain America's strong, superhero spawn-baby. Joke was on them when you were born defective, just as pre-serum Steve Rogers had been all those decades before. Thankfully, before you could be "put down" as planned, the Avengers swooped in to save the day. They raided the HYDRA base without even knowing what was inside. It took a DNA test aimed at trying to locate your parents that led to the discovery that poor unsuspecting Steve Rogers was now a father of a pitiful, lonely baby girl with big blue eyes and a bald head.