A/N: All righty. Some Pepper and Allie cuddles, and then... an adventure...
Today there was a platypus on the sofa. Pepper came in, did a double-take, and then grinned. "Allie?" The platypus looked up and let out a chirp. "Why are you a platypus?"
Allie did the equivalent of a shrug, and rolled over in her nest of blankets to expose her soft belly.
Pepper gave her a belly rub and a kiss on the head, and continued on to the kitchen.
Allie shifted into a puppy wearing an adorable blue sweater, and trotted after her. The CEO made herself a chicken wrap and then flopped herself down on Pepper's feet, covering the delicate open-toe heels and warming the CEO's feet instantly.
Pepper relaxed, almost boneless, into her chair and sighed. "Thank you sweetheart," she murmured.
Allie wagged her tail. She sat there as a space heater for Pepper's toes until she finished eating and then followed Pepper into the elevator, wagging her tail.
"You coming down to the office with me, sweetie?" Pepper asked.
Allie yipped happily.
Pepper picked her up, not wanting her to run off and get lost on this less-secure part of the building. She let Allie down once she reached the office, and Allie immediately jumped on Pepper's lap once the CEO sat down. "You're very cuddly today," Pepper said. "You feel all right?"
Allie licked her hand in reply.
"Okay then." Pepper got to work, absently petting her.
During meetings or conference calls Allie would hide under the desk. As one call dragged on, and on, and on, Pepper subtly dropped a tablet and a pair of earbuds under her desk. A second later the blue glow of a movie lit up her feet. She grinned inwardly.
When the conference call was over, Tony came in. "Good afternoon, Miss Potts," he said breezily.
"Mr. Stark," she replied demurely, and they grinned at each other.
He leaned forward to kiss her, and was interrupted by a small pair of paws on his leg. "Eh, ahem, hey Allie." He picked her up. "What are you doing down here?"
She yipped cheerfully and bopped his jaw with her nose.
He smooched her head in reply.
"Allie was keeping me company," Pepper said, smiling. "And keeping my feet warm."
"Aw," Tony cooed, giving Allie another smooch on the head.
JARVIS spoke up. "Little miss, may I remind you that you still have to do twenty minutes of learning."
The puppy pouted and buried her head in Tony's jacket.
Tony smirked. "What if you came and helped me with the bots?" he asked. "Do you think playing mechanic would work?"
Allie peeked out from his jacket and nodded.
"All right." He set her down on the floor and they watched as she turned into a dragon. "Are you going to do the welding?" Tony asked, highly amused.
She let out a poof of smoke and rawred happily.
Tony suddenly looked contemplative. "You know, if you could actually breathe fire, you could do some spot-welding-"
"No Tony," Pepper said firmly.
"But Pep-"
"No." She looked at Allie. "Don't let him do it."
The little dragon nodded seriously.
"Fine." Tony held out an arm, and let Allie the dragon sit on his arm like a falcon would. "We'll see you later, Pepper."
"All right. Have fun Allie!"
They did some upgrades on the bots, and then Allie played checkers with Steve till it was time for dinner.
A~A~A~A
The next few weeks passed rather peacefully, and the weather was getting warmer every day. And then the Avengers were called out on a secret mission to Siberia. Nobody was very happy about it, especially Allie, but they couldn't exactly say no. So it was just her and Pepper and the bots rattling around in the living floors of the towers. Pepper let Allie come sleep with her in the penthouse, and the two of them would stay up and drink hot cocoa and watch "Audwey Hipbun" movies.
On the second day of the Avengers' absence, Pepper and Allie went down to Steve's apartment to look for some crayons that she'd left in his living room. Except he hadn't left them on the coffee table; thus the search.
Pepper's phone rang with a call she absolutely could not dismiss, so she stepped away to her office three floors up.
Allie continued searching for her crayons, with her Bucky Bear for company. She found Steve's art supplies in a closet, and instead of crayons, discovered some chalk pastels. She investigated their worth as a crayon-substitute ("too dusty", she decided), and put everything back. Her crayons must be elsewhere.
She left the closet, and then the lights went out. She froze. "JARBIS?" she asked uncertainly. "Light?"
The dim orange emergency lights came on, but JARVIS didn't reply. And then the orange lights turned off, leaving the hallway completely black.
"JARBIS?" Allie asked again, getting scared.
No answer.
"Pepper?" Allie called, heading towards the elevator. It was off. "JARBIS?"
Still no answer.
Allie shapeshifted into a small grey kitten, her night vision improving by two hundred percent. She padded silently back to the living room, where there was natural light - except it was seven in the evening and it was dark. She let out a hiss of distress and licked at her front paw anxiously to keep quiet.
Then she heard the footsteps. They were almost silent, like mommy's, but they were more shuffly. Those weren't footsteps of family.
She transformed into a snake, and slid under the nearest sofa to hide. This way she had heat vision.
A tall, muscled figure moved into the living room. He paused, looked around, and then walked all the way in. The way he moved looked dangerous, like when mommy and daddy were training.
Allie shivered nervously, watching the intruder go from desk to bookshelf to TV. Was he looking for something? Why'd he turn the lights off? He couldn't see, could he?
She slithered out of the room silently, and snuck halfway down the hallway before turning into her human form. She ran quietly for the elevator and pushed the button again frantically. "JARBIS," she whispered, "please, please, open."
But nothing happened.
Stairs, she suddenly remembered, there were stairs. She could take the stairs up to the penthouse, or, wait, down. Down to where there were people working, even on Sundays. She could find nice Mr. Happy from security, and he'd keep her safe till Pepper came to get her.
She turned to run to the stairs, and found herself face to face with the large shadowy stranger. She opened her mouth to scream in terror, but he caught her around the waist and clapped a hand over her mouth before she could make a sound. She whimpered against his gloved hand, and struggled. She hit his vulnerable parts with her knee, hoping he'd let go, but he just grunted and moved down the hallway.
Allie twisted and wriggled for all she was worth, but the intruder held fast. He went back to the living room, picked up the fallen stuffed toy on the floor, and handed it to her. She grabbed the Bucky Bear eagerly, and tried to break his one-handed grip on her arm.
"Stop," he commanded in a deep voice, shaking her slightly.
She froze in fear that he might hit her.
He picked her up again, and suddenly he was bundling her in one of Steve's sweatshirts. He dropped the hood over her head, and then suddenly they were moving. Fast.
Allie couldn't help whimpering in fear, and she clutched her Bucky Bear tightly. It felt like they were going down the stairs twenty at a time, and her stomach dropped into her feet.
Then the air from outside hit her bare toes, and she whimpered again. They were outside the Tower and JARVIS didn't know where she was... maybe now she'd better scream, with lots of people around? She opened her mouth to take a deep breath - and then there was a hand over her mouth again.
"Scream, and die," the man told her calmly.
She swallowed her scream, letting out a little sob instead, and he released her mouth. Then he was running, and after ten minutes Allie started to get carsick. Not carsick, run-sick? What was it called?
Then finally they stopped, and the man swung her off his shoulder. He plopped her on a hard wooden chair, and said sternly, "Stay."
She huddled into the sweatshirt, and looked around. It was dark in the building, but she could make out a table, and a stove, and a bed. It was a little apartment, like the one Darcy's friend lived in. But there were no pictures or pretty things on the shelves. Not even a book. Was this where the stranger-person lived?
The stranger had started pacing around the tiny area, muttering in what Allie recognized as Russian. He looked tired and frustrated, and kept tugging at his long hair. He kept saying things about protocol and handlers. Maybe he was a bad spy and he needed his handler, like a Bad-Coulson. But if he was a spy... that meant he knew her mommy. Everybody knew mommy. Maybe he'd give her back so mommy wouldn't get mad at him.
Allie cleared her throat. "You a spy?" she asked.
He stopped and looked at her. "What?"
"You a spy?" she repeated.
"Yes," he said shortly.
She nodded. "You know my mommy? She's de Black Widow."
His shoulders stiffened and his vision went blank. "Natalia Alianovna Romanova," he said, like JARVIS reciting a list. "Sole surviving member of the Black Widow program. Agent for SHIELD. Member of the Avengers Initiative."
"Dat's her," Allie said, nodding. "If you don't take me back, mommy will find me, and daddy, and Steeb, and Tony, and Bwuce, and Coulson, and Tor, and then you be dead." She lifted her chin defiantly when he stared at her. "You has to give me back right now or else."
The strange man's mouth twisted up in a little grin. "I do, huh?" And his tone was a little less stiff.
"Yes." She nodded solemnly. "You has to take me back. Maybe, maybe you can work for SHIELD instead of bad-guys, and, and be a good-guy."
"I am not the bad guy," he replied. "I work for the freedom of the world."
"Who you work for?" she asked.
"HYDRA," he replied instantly.
Her eyes widened. "You work for HYDRA? But dat's bad. Dat's very bad. Dey killed Bucky! And a bunch of other people!" She hugged her stuffed animal tightly. "You a bad guy."
He glared at her. "Quiet. I'm trying to think." He returned to his pacing and muttering in Russian. And then he went to the window and stared out.
Allie glanced at the door. If she shapeshifted into a snake, she'd fit under the door jamb. Or- she glanced at the other window. It was open slightly. She could turn into a bird and fly away, right back to the Tower.
She shapeshifted into a bird just as the man turned back from the window. He let out a yell of surprise and Allie let out a cheep of dismay before making a break for the window.
He got there before her and slammed the window shut, almost catching her wingtips in the sash. He grabbed her out of the air and cupped his hands over her. "What the world?" he asked, staring at the frantically-fluttering bird in his hands. "You're a mutant."
She pecked at his fingers, and nipped his pinkie through the glove. She managed to get free, and turned back into herself. She glared at him. "You a stupid-head," she said spitefully, angry that her escape hadn't worked. "Hulk gonna smash you into bits."
He picked her up and set her in the chair again. "Don't move."
She pouted at him. "I don't wike you."
"I don't care," he retorted, glaring at her. "What's your name?"
"Allie Barton-Womanoff," she said. "My daddy's gonna put an awwow through your eyeballs." When he didn't respond to this impressive threat, she asked, "What's your name?"
"The Asset."
She shook her head. "Name, name."
"I don't have a name."
She frowned. "You mommy no like you either?"
"What?"
"My first mommy didn't wike me because I shapeshifts. Your mommy didn't like you either? Dat's why you not have a name?"
"No," he said. "I am The Asset."
"Dat's a stupid name. And it's got a bad word in it," was her sage reply. "Dat's a dollar in de jar. When you get captured mommy's gonna make you put a dollar in de jar. Maybe ten dollars, like Tony."
He rolled his eyes and went back to pacing.
She watched him pace for a while, and then asked, "Why were you at the Tower?"
"To steal back some information from Tony Stark." He held up a hard drive from his pocket.
Allie gasped. "You took a piece of JARBIS! Give it back!"
"No." He put it back in his pocket.
"But you made him have an owie!"
"Repairing the computer was not my mission," he said dismissively.
"What's your whole mission?" she asked, scowling at him. "Did you hurt JARBIS more?"
"No. My mission was also to look for information on this new Captain America."
"Steeb?" she asked. "Why?"
"To see what kind of enemy he is."
She scowled. "Steeb is awesome. Steeb's gonna kick you butt when he finds me."
"Yeah? You friends with him?"
She glared at him in reply.
He stood in front of her, tall and looming in the dark apartment. "Tell me about Captain America."
"He's from the forties," she replied. "He's de real Cap from the war. And the comics, but he doesn't like 'em cuz dey made Peggy Cawter look dumb and she's the smartest agent ever. Coulson said so."
"How has he adapted to this century? Tell me."
"He uses tablets," Allie replied, shrugging. "He likes de ones you can paint wif, with the little stick."
"Stylus," the man corrected.
"Stylus," she repeated.
"Tell me more."
She frowned. The last time she'd heard Steve talk about adapting to the twenty-first century, he and Tony had been talking about Steve's old friends from the war. "He misses everybody," she said sadly. "His ma and Peggy Cawter and Bucky and Dum Dum and Howid Stark, Tony's dad, and Jack Da-near and Fall-worth, and especially Bucky." She lifted up the bear. "This is Bucky. Well, this is Bucky Bear. But he's based on de real Bucky, Barnes, from de war. He's a collec-ible. Coulson gave him to me. He's my favorite."
"Bucky?" the man echoed, giving her a strange look.
"Yeah. James Bucky Barnes. He was Steeb's bestest friend in de whole world. He helped Steeb get better when he was sick and he helped Steeb go to art school and he was a sniper in de army and when he got captured Steeb went to save him, and den dey were all together in a team, like de Avengers but all regular heroes, 'cept for Steeb, and Bucky a bit, cuz he got 'sperimented on just a teensy bit, and den he died when he fell off a train and Steeb was sad, and sometimes he's still sad, but Steeb told me dat it's good to 'member the happy parts, and dere was dis one time dat Steeb and Bucky were little, like me but bigger, and dey borrowed a bucket-" She rambled on cheerfully, smoothing Bucky Bear's soft fur as she talked. Her favorite person besides daddy and mommy was Steve, and her favorite subject besides Mulan was Bucky Bear's origin story. Between Steve's stories and Coulson's comic books, she had enough info to talk for hours.
The stranger didn't seem to mind. He sat cross legged on the floor in front of her and watched her face as she spoke about 'Steeb' and 'Buck' and 'Steeb's ma' and 'Bucky's ma' and 'de woman from de orphanage that I fowgot her name' and 'de grumpy Col Phillips' and 'Peggy Cawter' - that was Allie's third-favorite subject. She loved Natasha, Pepper, Peggy Carter, and Darcy, in that order.
"-But everybody's old now or dead cuz they're old, and Steeb told me Peggy's got sumtin' wrong with her memories so she doesn't know it's now, and it makes him sad so we don't talk about old-Peggy much, just young-Peggy, but dat's okay because he liked the drawing I made wif him and Peggy in it, and, I drew another one wif Bucky in it, but that one made Steeb a little sad. He kept it anyway, cuz he said it was a good drawing, and-" She stopped suddenly and tilted her head at him. "Why you keep staring?"
"Because," he said, rubbing at his temples. Her chattering was giving him a headache, but he didn't want her to stop. He ignored the pain and resumed his steady gaze.
She frowned at him. "It's wude to stare. Pepper told me so, and she's a lady." She kicked her feet against the legs of the chair. "I'm hungwy."
"There is no food."
She scowled at him. "You not a good kidnapper."
He raised an eyebrow. "You've been kidnapped before?"
She nodded. "Dey stuck me in a closet, but at least dey had snacks. If you live here why don't you have snacks?"
"I don't live here. This is a safe house. No one knows about it. If my handlers find out about it, though, we'll both be in trouble."
"Why?"
"If they see you, they'll kill you for real. Or they'll take your memories and turn you into a spy, too."
Her eyes widened. "Dat's bad."
"Yes it is."
"Why did you take me then?" she asked indignantly. "You a bad spy."
He sighed. "I don't know." He rubbed at his head. "I can't think. I'm malfunctioning. My head hurts." He needed recalibration. He needed maintenance. He needed-
"Turn de light on," Allie told him. "You's not s'posed to think too hard in the dark, Bwuce said. Gives you migwaines, den he's the Hulk and he's all growly."
He glared at her, but didn't see any harm in the suggestion. The windows were curtained, anyhow. He flipped the light on, and shoved the hair away from his face with a wince. The headache did not diminish.
Allie let out a little yelp at seeing his full features. "You Bucky!" she shrieked, scrambling out of the chair. "You look just like Bucky from the pictures!"
He growled. "Quiet!"
She couldn't be quiet. She was blowing her little four-year-old lid sky-high. "Why do you look like Bucky!?" she yelled. "You're a bad spy!"
He grabbed at his head as the headache pushed his eyes closed. "Shut up!" he yelled back.
"No! Take me home!" she demanded, and threw the first temper tantrum of her entire life as she started screaming, "TAKE ME HOME TAKE ME HOME TAKE ME HOME-"
"Fine!" He grabbed her around the waist, started for the door, and keeled over midway as pain blasted through his temples.
Allie fell out of his grasp, tumbled over the dusty carpet, and watched in fear as the stranger-that-looked-like-Bucky kneeled on the carpet clutching his head. The tumble had knocked the temper right out of her and now she felt like crying, or hiding. "You okay?" she asked nervously. "You not a Hulk, right?"
"No," he groaned, trying to block out the light and the sight of that stupid stuffed animal. He slid to a seat against the wall.
She grabbed her Bucky Bear. "Where's de phone? I call the amb-li-ance."
"Don't have a phone," he ground out between gritted teeth. "Be quiet, Becca."
"My name's not Becca," she said warily, after a moment. "Dat's Bucky's sister's name. She's old and lives in Queen. Steeb said so."
He groaned again, seeing a small girl carrying a ratty blanket, her thumb in her mouth. 'Stop it, Becca, you'll get buck-teeth and then we'll both be called Buck'. She'd cried and gone to their mother for consolation. 'It's true, Becks, tell her Stevie-' Another flash of memory, two skinny boys, one blond and one brown, looking in a shop window. 'One day, Bucky, we'll have a television. A television and enough food to be full every single day, and send your sis to school in Paris.'
"Mister spy?" A soft hand patted his cheek, bringing him back to the present somewhat. "Mister spy? Why you cwyin'?"
He curled further into a ball. "I'm not," he gasped. "Crying's for girls."
"Steeb cwies," she informed him. "And if Steeb can cry you can cwy too."
Another flash of memory. The blond boy, older and paler now, standing over a freshly covered grave, his eyes red-rimmed with unshed tears. 'It's okay to cry, Stevie. It's okay, she's your ma, nobody'll say nothing.' 'I can't, Buck, I ain't got tears left.' A muscled arm slung over skinny shoulders. 'That's okay too.'
"Steve." He let out a strangled sob. "Steven Grant Rogers, my best friend, my brother. He was supposed to be my mission."
Allie's eyes widened to the size of small moons as she contemplated the fact that this might be the real Bucky. He looked like him. "How you the real Buck?" she asked. "Bucky died from the twain."
"No," came the choked reply. "No, the train. My arm, it hurt, and-" he was strapped to the table, screaming - "HYDRA, they took me. Fixed me. Froze me." Wiped his mind, forced him to learn Russian. "I was the Asset." 'He's been too long out of the ice, wipe him again.' "But I'm not." It was a sob. "I'm me. I'm me." James Buchanan Barnes, Sgt, service number 32557038.
Allie watched in fascination as he started to shudder, his whole body shaking as he wept. And then she did what she'd done for all of the people in the Tower - she turned into a puppy, and nestled into his lap, resting her head on his heart.
He ignored her for a long time, and then suddenly went limp against the wall, one of his hands falling gently on her back.
She glanced up at him cautiously.
He was staring at the wall opposite, his gaze a thousand miles, seventy years, away. He pet her absently. "Steve always wanted a dog," he whispered, and when he spoke, his voice was different. Accented like Steve's when he was tired. "But he always had allergies, never could get one." He fell silent again.
Allie stayed there, afraid to move, afraid to leave he-who-might-be-Bucky, afraid to get caught by the bad-spies, afraid that if she tried to escape again that the Avengers wouldn't be able to find her. She would just have to stay put.
A~A~A~A
JARVIS's malfunction had lasted for eight minutes, twenty-two seconds, trapping Pepper in the office, and Allie in Steve's quarters. But when he came back online and began to run detailed diagnostics, Pepper was still there and Allie was- where was Allie?
Dread began to form in the pit of JARVIS's processors. He ran a scan for all her known bio-signatures, all throughout the tower, and found nothing. Absolutely nothing.
He scoured the security footage from Captain Rogers' apartments. There was nothing. They were blank. He switched instead to heat signatures, and panicked when he realized that there were two heat signatures in Captain Rogers' apartment until their abrupt exit towards the stairwell sixty-seconds before his main processors came back online. He went back and tracked the heat signature into the building, into Sir's lab, out of Sir's lab, into Captain Rogers' quarters, and then back out the building with Allie. The size of the heat signature put it about a man, six foot tall.
He accessed the nearby cameras in the street and captured the image of a man dressed in full black sprinting away from the tower, a small bundle on his shoulder. He started a program to track the intruder through the surveillance system of the city.
All of this took .5 seconds for JARVIS to discover, and then he informed Mrs. Stark. By the time he'd given Pepper all the details, he'd lost track of the intruder on cameras.
He tried another tack, and pinged her Bucky Bear. It registered in a shoebox apartment on the other side of New York, and it was stationery. "I believe I've found her," he announced.
Pepper let out a sigh of relief. "Inform the Avengers," she told JARVIS.
They were on their way back from Siberia when JARVIS commed them. Clint slammed the throttle on the quinjet to maximum speed as soon as JARVIS started talking, and Thor and Iron Man jumped out of the jet to be the first responders.
A~A~A~A
Allie was still on Maybe-Bucky's lap. He was still muttering to himself, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in English, and the only thing that seemed to ground him was the puppy's soft fur, and her little head on his knee.
She ignored the grumbling in her tummy, and focused on the thought of the Avengers coming to rescue her and Maybe-Bucky. If he was Bucky, then that meant he wasn't a spy, and if he wasn't an actual HYDRA spy, they'd probably try and kill him, because HYDRA was evil. She would have to explain it to the Avengers, so they could go get rid of HYDRA.
Then there was the crackle of thunder, and the whoosh of a repulsor, and Thor and Iron Man burst into the apartment. Maybe-Bucky didn't respond, still staring at the wall.
Allie jumped out of his lap, and shifted immediately to her regular shape. "Don't hurt him," she said, holding a hand out to Thor. "He's Bucky. Maybe. He's Maybe-Bucky. His head hurts."
Thor picked her up and hugged her tightly. "We thought we'd lost you, child," he said, his eyes suspiciously bright. He held her close. "Are you hurt?"
"No. Just hungry. And my feets cold." She hummed appreciatively as he wrapped her up in his nice warm red cloak.
Tony couldn't take his eyes off the almost-catatonic man on the floor. He was a dead ringer for Bucky Barnes. "Allie? Did he say who he was?" he asked, opening his face mask.
"He said he was a bad-word-et," she said.
"A what?"
She pointed at her little bum. "Dat."
"Asset?" Tony asked, biting his cheek to stop from grinning.
"Yeah."
Tony gave a suspicious cough and then sobered. "All right. Anything else?"
"Dat after he fell off the twain dey fixed him and now he works for HYDRA 'cuz he fowgot who he was, and dey stuck him in a fweezer, and he knows lots of stuff about Steeb when he was little. And he thought I was Becca but I'm not, and then he was like dat for this whole time, and he's got a awful headache." She snuggled into the cloak.
Tony cleared his throat. "Sergeant Barnes?" he asked sharply, imitating Steve's soldier-tone.
Maybe-Bucky's head snapped up and he stiffened to attention against the wall.
Tony swallowed the lump of disbelief in his throat. "Can you tell me where you are, Sgt?" he asked.
Probably-Bucky blinked. "New York?" he asked hesitantly. He looked up at the metal suited man, and focused on his face. "Howard?" And then he pitched forward in a dead faint.
Allie let out a little shriek of surprise.
Then Tony noticed the bleeding coming from Probably-Bucky's ears and nose. "Some sort of brain damage, especially if he's been brainwashed," he said grimly. "Cap, ETA?"
"Ten minutes out."
"Allie's secure, and we've got the intruder in custody," Tony said, scooping up the unconscious man with a grunt. Something clanged when he picked him up, and he dropped him again to search for weapons. "Meet as at the Tower instead."
"Copy that, Iron Man."
Tony rifled through Probably-Bucky's pockets and clothes, looking for weapons. He took away ten knives, two small pistols, a baton-thing, a hard drive from the Tower, a carbon-strand garrote, several trackers, and- he stared at Probably-Bucky's left arm. It was completely metal. "Whoa," he said, after a second.
"Whoooooaaaa," Allie echoed, from Thor's arms. "He's got an Iron-Man arm!"
Tony shook his head and picked up the unconscious agent. "All right, let's go. Thor, you got her?"
"Yes."
They took off from the apartment, and landed on the roof of the Tower only a minute before the quinjet landed. Thor had barely unwrapped Allie from his cloak before she was in her parents' arms, and it fell to Bruce to actually turn the quinjet's engines off.
Steve and Coulson went directly to the Hulk Out room which was the most secure area in the Tower, and when they turned the corner, Steve stopped in his tracks. He turned pale, swallowed hard a few times, and then slowly approached the transparent aluminum glass. "Is that-" he started. "Bucky?" he finished.
"Maybe," Tony said, stepping out of his Iron Man suit. "Probably." He clapped Steve on the shoulder. "Bruce is going to check him over for brain damage, because until he heard Allie's stories about Steeb, he was an asset for HYDRA."
Steve turned another shade of white. "What."
Tony held up the hard drive from Bucky's pocket. "I didn't even know I had this information, it was in the data dump from SHIELD when I hacked it last, but apparently it was worth stealing by an ancient organization, so I'm going to go analyze this. You keep an eye on your ghost buddy." He nodded to Coulson meaningfully and went out.
Coulson kept a level head while Steve paced and fretted and stared at the unconscious man. Bruce kept a level head as he methodically ran scans and tests and cleaned up the blood on Probably-Bucky's face. JARVIS kept a level head while he ran identity checks on this unknown man. It was JARVIS that confirmed that Probably-Bucky was Definitely-Bucky.
Steve had to sit down and put his head between his knees to keep the room from spinning. "I can't believe it," he whispered. "How..."
"The little miss mentioned that Sgt. Barnes said he'd been frozen," JARVIS said helpfully.
"Cryo-stasis," Coulson muttered. Inwardly, he was rejoicing. Captain America reunited with Sgt. Barnes after seventy years... maybe Bucky would sign his trading cards, too. You know, once he was de-brain-washed.
At that moment Natasha came in with Allie in her arms. Allie wriggled down from Natasha's grip and ran over to Steve, throwing herself in his arms. "Is it Bucky?" she asked excitedly. "It is him for reals?"
"Yes, it is, doll," Steve said, hugging her tightly.
She grinned happily and kissed his cheek. "Good. Now you have your friend back." Her smile faded as she looked at Bucky. "Is he okay?"
"He will be," Bruce reassured her. "He's just sleeping right now."
She nodded. "He needs lots of sleep. He was cwyin, Steeb."
"Was he?" Steve asked, frowning.
"Lots." She touched Steve's cheeks. "He 'members you were 'llergic to puppies. You still 'llergic to puppies, Steeb?"
"No, not anymore."
"Good." She hugged him again, and then stepped back. "Mommy, can we have a snack now?"
"Yeah."
"Hold on, can I give you a checkup first?" Bruce asked, drawing Allie over to the portable scanner.
Natasha left her in Bruce's care and moved to the glass window. "The Winter Soldier," she murmured, staring at the red star on the silver arm. "He was a ghost, Steve. A legend. If I'd known he was Bucky, your Bucky, I would've told you..."
"I know," Steve said, leaning his head back against the glass to look up at her. "I'm going to need your help with him, though."
She nodded.
"All right, you're all good," Bruce declared, giving Allie a gold sticker. "Now go have a snack and a warm bath and then go to bed, okay?"
"Okay Bwuce." She was scooped up by her mother, and they went upstairs.
Surprisingly, that night, Allie didn't have any nightmares, her satisfaction at finding the real 'Bucky Bear' overwhelming her fear at the beginning of her adventure.
It was James Buchanan Barnes who sweated and screamed the entire night through, his mental programming passing the critical point and beginning to break down. He remembered so much, and he didn't know if it was real or not. But all through it, he heard the voice of a friend, a brother, that kept him breathing.
A/N: So as you can see, I'm not sticking with movie canon. Things will be different, and I will be incorporating certain ideas from my last couple of reviewers. Thanks for the suggestions!