Bucky doesn't notice the first time he dies.
Considering he's only five months old, he doesn't notice much of anything. His entire worldview revolves around being fed and clinging to his mother, and though he's faintly aware that he's too hot and that everything hurts more than it should, the only thing he can do about it is scream at the top of his lungs.
His mother notices though. She's been with him since his face first started to grow hot and has been holding him as comfortingly as she can from the moment both she and her husband realised that their infant was experiencing something far worse than a cold. While he goes off in search of a doctor, she continues to rock her screaming child and tries to ignore the choked gasps emerging from lungs far too small to deal with the pneumonia that's attacking them.
She desperately wishes her son would stop his incessant screaming, right up until the moment he does.
It only takes a minute for him to cough several times before opening doe-like eyes and giving her a gummy smile, but to Winifred Barnes that minute feels like years. Years in which she's been screaming non-stop and begging her child to wake as he lies still in her arms, and when he starts mumbling nonsense to her as if he hasn't just given her a heart attack, she throws aside her confusion and clutches him tightly in her arms.
When George returns with the doctor in tow, holding medicines that are no longer needed, she finds that she can't begin to explain what happened and settles for telling him nothing at all. The doctor's examination shows that their son's chest is clear in spite of the crackled wheezing which plagued him that morning and his temperature is starting to go down, and he leaves them with the assurance that their child will be well in a few days. Despite George's confusion over how quickly their son has recovered, he simply shrugs and puts the medicines in a cabinet for a future occasion, while Winifred looks down at the child drifting off to sleep in her arms, silently trying to make sense of everything.
She doesn't leave her son's side for two weeks. Every time she sleeps she can still see his blue lips and hear the silence in his chest, so she forgoes rest in order to watch as he sleeps peacefully in his crib, her finger clutched tightly in one chubby hand.
It takes those two weeks for her to decide that what happened on that fateful day must have been a trick of her anxious mind and that the hysteria of experiencing her son's first illness had clouded her perception. It's a much easier explanation to accept than the one in which her son dragged himself back to life in her arms.
This acceptance doesn't stop her from affectionately calling Bucky 'her miracle' for ten years, though.
She never tells him why.
A/N - This is one of those stories that wouldn't stop nagging at me until I wrote it down. Thankfully, by its very nature it'll be strictly nine chapters so there isn't much room for me to get as carried away as I have in the past :)
I hope you enjoy this and I'll try to get the rest written and uploaded as soon as I can!