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Bluebird Singing In The Dead Of Night | A Thunderbolts* Fanfic

CHAPTER ONE/?: The Child

Summary: The Thunderbolts are given a lead to investigate a (mostly) abandoned HYDRA facility. Bucky finds what they were working on.

Themes: Domestic life in the tower, found family, Winterdad energy, fluff with a smidge of angst, SamxBucky.

The light above the door before James Buchanan Barnes didn’t exactly fill his glass in a halfway full sort of way. No. The glaring red light makes it clear that it wants no intruders, despite Yelena’s very strong insistence that she can “handle it”. The steel, no doubt reinforced, door stands steadfast and he is left to mull through some documents he’d pilfered from someone’s desk on the way down.

The New Avengers, Thunderbolts, actually, had ditched the New York skylines for an ancient Hydra infested bunker after they’d received an anonymous tip. Anonymous had a pair of obnoxious steel wings and too much on his plate as was. Sure, Sam’s given Bucky the silent treatment since this whole “becoming Valentina’s project” thing started, but the soldier took what he could get.

The intercom crackles to life.

“So, there is the good news and the bad news, what do you want first?” The Russian’s question curls in her tone.

“All you had to do was unlock a door—“ Bucky half considers disconnecting the radio to handle things himself. He takes a deep breath.

“Good news it is then! I will! But there’s a magic passcode that’s slipping my mind… I think it starts with a P.” If words can sneer, Yelena’s certainly would. Bucky relented.

“Please, Yelena.”

The light shimmers to life as the emergency shutdown is overridden. Light floods the laboratory and the door remains… shut. If this is another joke, it’s not exactly funny.

That’s fine, he can handle it.

Bucky widens his stance and sends a left hook whistling into the broadside of the door. It caves inward and Bucky latches onto it. He leans into the metal until it folds under him like a sheet of plastic.

Bucky one, door zero. Take that. It’s his turn to smirk, but it doesn’t stick for long.

Whatever this room was, it still seems well maintained unlike the rest of the facility. Between the reinforced steel doors and added security, Bucky is sure this was the main floor of whatever heinous operations HYDRA had been running on the side of everything else.

It’s hard to ignore the sharp odor— something unmistakably sterile that puts Bucky back in the lab. It straps him back in the chair as needles and nerves snap beneath his skin. A nightmare he’s shared a bed with… the one that’s kept him miles away from any hospitals in New York. One he’d just walked into on a hunch.

Focus on the mission, Barnes. Says the little voice in his head. He forces himself to keep walking.

In and out. Then he can go back to his apartment, he can watch a movie and crack open a beer and let all of this fall to the wayside. But he cannot turn around. If HYDRA was this hellbent on keeping something secret, they need to handle it.

So, it’s in and out.

His glances to the tubes lining the walls. They’re filled up with some kind of translucent glowing fluid. The further he wanders, the more the tubes seem to meet up and cluster along the walls. Hell, the things even seem like they’re pulsing— a bit like a heartbeat. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

He pushes aside abandoned desk chairs and vaults over the skeletons of server mainframes that hiss with the new surge of electricity. Courtesy of Yelena Belova, widow extraordinaire.

It’s not long before Bucky follows the tubes to the very center of the lab. There, he stands before a series of glass columns that connect together at the laboratory’s ceiling far above him. Dark shadows shift behind the murky glass and Bucky’s stomach twists. What had they been growing? More super soldiers? Hybrids? Some monstrosity they could slip into humanity unnoticed? Did they succeed?

The world didn’t need more of that. More of him.

No, pull up. This is not the place to get stuck in the past, or become a flight risk.

There are few times that Bucky can acknowledge his own growth. If Steve was still around, he’d say something corny.

‘I’m proud of you for seeing the slope before you slip down it. That’s huge, Buck.’

He feels his chest wind tight, then exhales. It turns out Steve was right. He sees the slope, and takes a second to ground himself. HYDRA abandoned this lair, they cannot swoop in and jump him, and he has people now.

Loud and painfully chaotic people, but they’re his through and through.

Bucky shakes off the cloud and crosses the lab. Closing in on the tubes, he notices how they’re each labeled at the base. A series of letters and numbers are printed on each.

XX-001-T

XX-002-T

And so on.

Pressing his hand to the cool glass, he wipes away the grime and dust only to find a face staring back at him. A muscle in Bucky’s arm twitches. He leans in to get a better look and instantly regrets it.

It’s humanoid, whatever it is. Small and barely unfurled from the fetal position it floats in. All sickly green skin and buldging, glassy eyes. Dead.

If he vomits down here, no one would ever know. Bucky doubts they’d judge him for it though. The figure looks too small to be an adult or full grown by any means.

Whatever failsafe had been keeping it alive, failed, and wound up drowning them. It? Whatever it was, it looked like a child. Jesus, it’s disturbing to say the least. Dark veins tracing lines along their arms and legs, and arms like a gorilla, but it is small— too small to die the way it did. A HYDRA science project gone horribly wrong.

What are you then? Some familiar voice echoes in the recesses of his mind, A project gone right?

Far from it.

Maybe that’s enough explanation for what he does next.

He marches to the next one, like a toy soldier with a purpose. All of a sudden this has nothing to do with HYDRA, and it has everything to do with seeing if any of these assets survived their early stages in the lab's fallout.

He finds another much smaller specimen that met the same fate. This one has pale blonde hair. Before the next tank, his boots splash against the tile and he realizes it had been busted open. Broken glass mingles in the spilled fluid. Each step crunches beneath his boots as he methodically checks this tank too and finds a sad, wet mess of limbs, and too many joints— he keeps moving.

Five tanks later and with no success, he reaches the chamber marked XX-08. Bucky feels something heavy settle in the pit of his stomach. He is sure of what comes next. He will round this tank and find another floating corpse. How can it be anything else? How can he think that he can be the hero in this place? He knows what HYDRA can do. He knows that these aren’t anything more than experiments in test tubes with means to an end.

A rhythmic tapping breaks the silence. It’s soft, but intentional. It’s noticeable in the suffocating quiet. Bucky goes stock still. It’s the tank, the sound is coming from the tank. He slowly looks to his side and damn near has a heart attack. A pair of bright crimson eyes, blink back at him, and belong to something that is very much alive.

His earpiece crackles, “You’re not dead down there, are you Barnes?”

It’s Yelena. It’s always Yelena nowadays.

But what to say? ‘Not dead, but can’t say the same about the failed kid projects down here. Not to mention the one that’s STARING RIGHT AT ME. Yeah, don’t say that. Ease them into it. Think fast, Barnes, before Yelena starts the guessing game.

“Made it into the lab, and figured it would be simple, but it’s suddenly become a lot less… simple.” Bucky pauses, unsure of how to describe the creature before him as it starts pressing its hands to the glass. Engineered and grown by HYDRA. Did they know what they were? Did Bucky?

“You know I can’t really help if you don’t tell me what the problem is, Soldat.” Yelena is back on his shoulder, and he sighs.

“It’s Bucky.” And he gets the feeling it’s the last time he’ll hear that nickname from her. Yelena usually picks up on that. She’s good like that.

“It’s a —” He hesitates again, his mouth dry. Yeah, Bucky. What is it? “I’ve got something, just have the car ready once I’m out.”

“Mr. Talkative today, aren’t we? I’m still waiting for a special word.”

He rolls his eyes this time.

“Please, Yelena.” He grumbles, and maybe there’s a bit of a chuckle underneath.

“Oh! Gladly, Bucky!” And the radio clicks into silence.

And with that he turns to pull the plug on the tank. If anything, he’s doing the kid a favor. But he can’t seem to make himself follow through.

‘помощь!’

The hair on Bucky’s arm stands. He whips around, eyes frantically scanning for the source. But there’s no one else. Just him and experiment. XX-08-TO.

Help.

It’s simple Russian— nothing as complex as the libraries of vocabulary that sat in the darkest crevices of his memory. But much like riding a bike, it’s very hard to forget once you’ve learned it. Even when it’s stripped from you, apparently.

“How…?” He leans closer to the tube. If it was the kid, then how was it so clear?

HELP!

It’s clearer now, but the kid's mouth never moves. It’s like she spoke through the radio in his ear. It’s bizarre to say the least. But he hears them loud and clear.

“… back up.” He says, and gestures by brushing his hand forward in a motion. The kid complies by moving to the back of their tank and covering their head.

Bucky, in one fluid move, throws a punch into the glass wall. The impact splinters from the bottom all the way to the top. He shields his eyes just as explodes into fractals and water gushes over the edge. It sloshes over his boots and is weirdly heavy. Definitely not regular water. The kid collapses to their knees and hunches forward. They shudder and hack up lungfuls of the same fluid pooling around Bucky’s feet. Probably their body rejecting whatever it was. Bucky isn't some damn scientist, he didn’t understand it. All he sees is a kid— an experiment choking on whatever was keeping them alive for god knows how long.

None of it matters. Bucky grabs one of the abandoned lab coats and drapes it over their shoulders. His hand hovers— static… before it settles on their back and rubs in light, slow circles. He’s twelve and rubbing circles into his fever-ridden baby sister's back as she throws up into the waste bin.

“Easy there, kid. Cough it all up.” Bucky stays steadily beside them. They hiccup and sputter. He just focuses on holding them upright, and anchoring them. “It’ll feel better if you get it out.”

The kid shudders and leans into him. He can’t say he blames them. If that tube was some sort of stasis situation, then maybe this is shock? Some kind of involuntary body reset because he didn’t do whatever procedure that needed to be done? Because he decided to bust the glass in instead of looking for some damn instructions? Hell if he knew.

The circular massage is methodical. Nothing else comes out and now the kid gulps in the dank underground air in gaping lungfuls.

Bucky hasn’t needed to be this for anyone in a long time. Not since Bob, hell, not since the Thunderbolts as a whole. The act of taking care of someone had been foreign to him for so long that he almost forgot he knew how to do it.

He continues to guide, letting that brotherly instinct settle in, “Deep breaths, kid. Deep. You’re alright.”

The radio crackles to life, “So any groundbreaking discoveries from the rest of the team?” It’s Yelena. The liberal use is pretty much reserved to her, Bob, and Alexei.

“When’s the last time anyone’s been here again? There’s a bunch of these reports but they’re from 2012.” Ava’s disinterest comes through loud and clear, “Reports on different assets and something about collecting traceable genetic evidence. Listen to this, ‘Data collection has put our numbers at great risk. Just last week we lost 8 alone during the invasion of outer space. Prioritize all assets that have interstellar capabilities: Thor Odison is a prime candidate! and only move in after the conflict has settled. The Grand Commander will reward us greatly for our efforts. But first we must provide a living, successful specimen’— I mean they just keep rambling on and on about this Grand Commander guy, but it’s been a decade and this place is clearly abandoned.”

Specimen.

Bucky feels the weight of the kid in his arms. No more coughing, but they look exhausted.

“Leave it to HYDRA to stalk around after the fight is done.” Yelena’s voice is dripping with honesty.

“YELENA!” Everyone’s ear piece’s must squeal at the same time because their collective response to Alexei is to put it back in his ear, and not to yell into it like an actual microphone

“Dad! We’ve been through this— the ear piece goes in the ear. That is why it is called an ear piece.”

The effort is futile.

“NOT TO FEAR, I HAVE DISCOVERED THE SUPERIOR FORM OF COMMUNICATION ON THESE SMALL DEVICES. THIS IS MUCH CLEARER, YES?” Leave it to Alexei to collectively deafen the entire group.

Bucky can’t even massage his ear because his arms are full. Just his luck, honestly. That’s him, alright. Mr. Lucky Bucky.

Yelena is busy squabbling with Alexei over the shared line, and Bucky sighs. This could take a while, and waiting didn’t seem in his best interest. So, he moves to his feet, and leans down to the kid.

“Don’t need you stepping on some broken glass, so,” he gestures to his open arms. This kid stares back, and he feels the awkwardness filling the space between them. He lingers, thinks for a moment, then tries the request again.

This time, however, it is in Russian.

It’s perfect pronunciation, and it comes to him like second nature. He and Yelena use it from time to time to joke around Walker behind his back— he used to use it with Nat too. But that was a long time ago.

All at once the kid perks up and nods. Okay, so the kid definitely knew Russian— that made a weird amount of sense. Then again, yeah. If that’s all you hear for your whole life, it’s what you’ll pick up. Well, that along with being literally blue and having red eyes.

As much as Bucky wants to know exactly why that was, he doesn’t waste anymore time. He hooks his arms under the kids knees and shoulders, and lifts them up with ease. Then, in about half the time he took to get down, he made it back up to the surface.

Walker had joined in on the radio line to clog it up even more. Which was totally fine. It’s not like Bucky had anything major to report anyways. It’s not like he’s given orders to keep this line strictly professional.

Nope, not once.

So, it’s no surprise that the first thing out of Yelena’s mouth after he walks out of the door isn’t ‘What did you find?’ Or ‘What took so long?’

Rather it’s, “Ah, Bucky! So nice of you to— IS THAT A KID?”

Then, all at once, the whole team does something that Bucky hasn’t seen in a long time. They’re silent.

He can hear the wind pushing a stray plastic bag across the blacktop.

“As far as I’m aware.” Short and simple as he crosses the space between them and aims for the black van that was borrowed to their team.

“Uh, wait a damn second, why are you putting her in the van? She obviously needs a hospital or something—“ Walker’s quick to catch up with him, but Bucky doesn’t falter.

“Oh yeah, because they’re going to understand why this kid is blue.” No one argues with that logic. And without missing a beat, he adds to answer Yelena’s unasked question, “We aren’t keeping her either. We take her back to the tower, get her something to wear and eat, then I’ll handle the rest.”

Two silences in one day. Bucky’s luck is looking up. He buckles the kid into the back, and Ava phases in. The mask hides whatever she must be thinking, but she sheds her hooded cloak. In one sweep, the little girl is tucked in.

Yelena sits on her other side and Bucky feels comfortable leaving the back of the van. Well, he does until something pulls at the back of his jacket. He’s about to scold Yelena, but turns to realize it’s the girl’s sinewy azure fingertips gripping him instead.

He sighs and sits down next to her. Alexei and John take the front seats, and before long the van is rumbling to life and the ride back is mostly uneventful. John and Alexei are going back and forth about what the team should have for supper, Ava is tucked in a corner where she can keep an eye on the kid, and Yelena actually looks like she fell asleep. The kid did too, their cheek pressed into Bucky’s arm.

He squints, then sighs and leans back. No point in fighting it.

He pulls out his cellphone and his fingers punch out a text before he returns it to his pocket.

Now all he had to do was wait. He can do that.

#reblog #marvel fanfiction #love love love this

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