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“This is a bad idea,” Bucky says for the fifteenth time as he aggressively braids Mia’s hair. “We need to get a flight home right now. Or we could just run for it.” He tugs on Mia’s hair particularly hard, and she lets out a squeak. Bucky immediately drops her hair and says, “Sorry, baby. Let’s let Daddy do your hair. Which we can show to the flight attendant, on our way home.”
“Now Buck,” Steve says calmly, picking up Mia’s long blonde hair and beginning to clumsily braid it, “we already said we’d be here, and we flew all this way. We’re going to go and have a nice time talking to your family, okay?”
“My family hates me , Steve,” Bucky argues, twisting his wedding ring around his finger.
“No, they don’t.”
“Daddy,” Mia says solemnly, “Papa can have Bear if he’s sad.”
“That’s very sweet of you honey, but Papa’s just nervous about seeing Aunt Rebecca,” Steve says. Bucky sits on the bed beside Mia and drops a kiss to Bear’s head.
“I feel better already,” he says with a soft smile. “Thank you, baby.”
“You’re welcome Papa.” Mia wraps her arms around his neck and presses a kiss to his cheek, which makes Steve melt a little, although she destroys the partial braid he’d made in the process. Not feeling too put out about it, he unravels her hair again and steps back so Bucky can take over. Bucky had gone overboard with the research after they’d adopted Mia, and that involved learning how to create several hairstyles in varying levels of intricacy. Nevermind that Mia was completely bald when they’d gotten her.
She’d been so tiny then. When they finally got to take her home, she had nestled perfectly into the crook of Steve’s arm. Now she was four, getting bigger every day, and Steve couldn’t wrap his head around how fast time had flown. Looking at her and Bucky...he was constantly amazed by the overwhelming amount of love he felt for the two of them.
He squeezes Bucky’s shoulder gently, trying to coax some of the nerves out of him. “It’s just a family reunion, Buck,” he reminds him. “We just have to stay for a few hours, and then we can leave and do whatever we want.” Steve smiles down at his husband. “Okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” Bucky mumbles, but his fingers get a little steadier as he does Mia’s hair, so Steve counts it as a win.
Once Mia’s hair is done and they’re all ready to go, they load into the rental car. They’re staying in Detroit but Rebecca Barnes-Proctor and her family live on a lake in Novi, about a thirty minute drive away. Mia has a jolly time singing along to her songs in the backseat. Steve drives, since Bucky can’t stop fiddling with his ring. A small facet of the anxiety that still haunts him. About halfway through the drive, Steve covers Bucky’s hand with his own, and Bucky grips Steve’s hand tightly in response.
Bucky and his sister hadn’t spoken much since his aunt and uncle had kicked him out. They’d talked infrequently over the past seven years, until Rebecca had proposed a family reunion at their lake house in Michigan. Steve and Bucky had accepted the invitation out of politeness more than anything. Steve knew Bucky’s relationship with his sister was the source of a lot of stress and tears. They’d been close before he came out to his family. But Steve knew Bucky had pretty much given up on ever having that with her again.
Nevertheless, Steve had insisted it would be a good way to clear the air between them, and that Mia deserved to know her family. At that, Bucky had relented. The man would crawl across hot coals if he thought it would benefit Mia in some way. Not that Steve can say much about that. He’d do the same.
Now, though, Steve’s wondering if it’s worth it, with all the anxiety rolling off of Bucky in waves. Bucky seems to sense what he’s thinking, because he gives him a small but genuine smile, and starts singing along to the CD of children’s songs they brought along for Mia. Steve’s not entirely convinced by the act, but it settles his thoughts down enough for him to focus on driving.
The Barnes-Proctors’ lakehouse is huge, so large even Mia lets out a long, “Woah,” when they pull up. Steve parks the car and they walk to the door, he and Bucky gripping each other’s hands, Mia secured against Bucky’s hip. A young woman opens the door after they knock and grins at the sight of them.
“Oh my God, you must be James! I’m Clare, we’re cousins, I think we met at Aunt Bernice’s Christmas party when we were little. Is this your daughter? What a little cutie-pie. What’s your name, sweetheart?”
In a burst of shyness, Mia presses her face into Bucky’s shoulder. “What do we say when someone asks for our name?” Steve gently prompts.
“Mia Sarah Barnes-Rogers,” Mia whispers. Clare looks positively tickled.
“Oh, so precious.” Clare extends her hand to Steve. “And you must be Steve, so good to finally meet you! Fair warning, we’re all very curious about you. Come on in, all of you. My son Mason is about to go swim in the lake, maybe Mia would like to join him? We’ve got a lot of chaperones out, don’t worry - “
Steve blocks out Clare’s chatter when he realizes Becca is standing in the middle of the hall. She and Bucky stare at each other. Steve carefully takes Mia into his arms and murmurs something about bringing her down to the lake before walking off with Clare to give them some privacy.
Steve takes Mia down to the beach, and helps her take off her dress so she’s just in her swimsuit. “Will you play with me, Daddy?” she asks.
“Not right now. I’m going to wait for Papa, okay? But your cousin Mason’s gonna come play with you.”
Mia beams at him. “I wanna come here every day!” she declares. Steve just smiles in response. Eventually, Clare returns with her son, who looks to be about Mia’s age, and they waddle into the water together, digging up clumps of wet sand and smearing it onto their skin. Steve just sits and enjoys the sun for a while, until there’s movement beside him and Bucky’s sitting down next to him, eyes red.
“How you doing?” Steve asks, running his fingers through Bucky’s hair. Bucky just sighs in response and rests his head on Steve’s shoulder.
“She didn’t talk to me for years,” he says. “Just went along with whatever my aunt and uncle said.”
“She was fourteen then, Buck. Just a kid. And she’s your sister. It’s alright to love her in spite of it.”
Bucky was quiet for a moment. “She says she has a birthday gift. For Mia. Apparently she forgot to mail it and figured she’d just give it to us here.”
“That’s nice of her.”
“Yeah.” Bucky lets out another long sigh. “I’m happy now, Steve. I love you, I love Mia, I love my job, I love our friends. I’m happy. But Becca...she makes me feel like that terrified little college student who felt so alone and miserable, and I don’t know if that feeling’s ever going to go away.”
“I don’t think your relationship is going to heal after one encounter at a family reunion, but I don’t think that feeling will last. You’ve both changed a lot. I think, once you get to know each other again, that feeling will fade.” Steve kisses his hair. “You’re loved so deeply, you know that? By me, and by Mia. Sometimes I wonder how it’s even possible to love another person as much as I love you. Even if you and Becca never end up working things out, I will always love you. We will always be a family. So you don’t have to worry about ever being unloved, alright? Not gonna happen.”
Bucky smiles and tilts his head up to kiss Steve. He says, “I love you, too.” They leave the conversation at that.
Mia plays in the water for about half an hour, until a man comes outside and yells that it’s lunchtime and everyone starts evacuating the beach. Once they’re all seated with food, that’s when the questions really start coming.
“What line of work are you two in?” “I’m an artist and Bucky’s a historian.”
“How long have you been together?” “Twelve years this December.”
“Where’re you livin’ now?” “We have a house in Brooklyn.”
“Planning on any more kids?”
“Definitely,” Steve answers, and Bucky gives him a huge grin. The questions continue like that for a while, since the rest of the fairly sizeable Barnes-Proctor clan all know each other and live fairly close to one another. Steve, Bucky, and Mia are the outsiders.
Bucky’s fairly quiet throughout the meal, only speaking when specifically addressed and perfectly content to let Steve field the majority of the questions being aimed at them. Steve glances from him to Rebecca. She’s sitting on the opposite side of the table, staring intently at her pulled pork.
Rebecca’s life hadn’t quite worked out the way Bucky’s did. She was accepted into Harvard, began studying Economics, and met Joe Proctor, who was in MIT. She got pregnant a year later and was cut off from her aunt and uncle the same way Bucky had been. She and Joseph got married, dropped out of school, and moved back to Michigan where they stayed with Rebecca’s cousin, each working two jobs to pay for their kid’s expenses and save enough money to return to school. But then their daughter, Winnie, had died. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. No way of preventing it. Two years later, she’d had a miscarriage. And another one a few years later.
They’re about to become foster parents. Steve truly hopes it works out for them. He’d spent years judging Rebecca for ignoring Bucky when all he wanted was acceptance, but he could realize now that she’d been a young, scared, impressionable orphan who wanted her aunt and uncle to love her as desperately as Bucky had. It was guilt and heartache that had kept her from contacting Bucky all these years. It wasn’t fair to Bucky, not when he’d tried to repair their relationship and had only been met with silence, but that was how things were. Steve had stopped judging Rebecca. They’d all had difficulty in their lives.
He turns his attention to Mia, sitting sandwiched protectively between him and Bucky. The teddy bear they’d given her the day she came home from the hospital, aptly named Bear, is sitting in her lap as she clumsily scoops up some baked beans. Steve swoops in before this can end in tears.
“Why don’t I put Bear on the table while we eat?” he says, extracting the bear and moving him to safer ground. “That way he can see everyone.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Mia says happily, moving on to her watermelon. Steve smiles and kisses her cheek. He knows that eventually Mia will grow older and won’t be so carefree, won’t be as willing to listen to Steve and Bucky, but God help him he hopes she doesn’t. He wishes she could stay this innocent, happy four-year-old forever.
“Papa, what’s this?”
Bucky looks over. “That’s pulled pork, honey.”
“Is it good?”
“I don’t like it, but your Daddy does. Try a bit.”
Mia dutifully takes a bite of the pulled pork, and her face instantly screws up in disgust. Bucky looks pointedly at Steve. “That’s two-to-one on the pulled pork, Steve.”
“Yeah, yeah. Your palates just aren’t as refined as mine.”
Bucky smirks. “Says the man whose idea of a meal is to just boil whatever meat he can find.”
“I don’t hear you complaining when you get home from work to a homecooked meal.”
“Nah, I only start complaining when you make me eat it.”
Steve scowls at him, which only makes Bucky grin harder. The aunts coo over them.
After they’re done eating, Mia wants to go play in the water again, to which Steve says no, and this prompts an outburst of epic proportions. But then one of the aunts offers to take Mia down to the water with her cousin, completely ignoring Steve as he tries to politely protest and taking Mia’s hand before leading her out of the house. Bucky goes down to supervise and give Steve some time off.
He ends up heading outside anyway, finding a spot to sit on the deck, which overlooked the beach and lake. It’s relatively quiet and he can see Bucky and Mia playing down by the water. It’s the most carefree Bucky had looked all weekend.
“Your daughter’s really cute.”
Steve looks up to see Becca standing next to him, shoulders hunched in on herself. He smiles weakly and responds, “Thanks.”
“Mind if I sit?”
Steve shakes his head and Becca takes the seat beside him. “I know you think I hate him,” Becca says, looking down the hill at Bucky, “but I promise that I don’t.”
“I don’t think that.”
“What do you think?”
Steve looks down. “I think it’s none of my business.”
Becca gives him a wry smile that reminds him of Bucky. “Sure.” She sighs and tugs on her braid. “I was...I was just a kid when he came out. So was he, really, but...I was scared, and I’d felt like he’d abandoned me, and I felt so alone. I didn’t want to listen to him. And my aunt and uncle, they told me all these horrible things and I was mad so I believed them.” She starts picking at the wooden arm of her chair. “Then years went by, and he stopped trying to talk to me, and I didn’t think he wanted me around anymore.”
“What about a few years ago? As soon as he got home from the hospital he tried to reconnect with you.”
“Steve, I hadn’t heard from him in years , what was I supposed to do? What would you do, if he left your life completely and then called you a decade later saying he nearly got blown up? We’d both changed so much, it didn’t even feel like I was talking to my brother anymore.” Becca sighs. “I didn’t mean to make excuses. I was wrong. Of course I was. But...I just want you to know that there was reasoning behind it. I wasn’t just doing it out of blind hate. And now, I...I’ve had him out of my life for so long. I didn’t even realize how much I missed.”
Becca looks away from Steve and out towards the water, where Bucky and Mia are playing by the water. Bucky scoops Mia up into his arms and twirls her around and Steve can hear her shrill giggles even with all the hubbub of Bucky’s relatives around him. “I missed her ,” Becca says, smiling at them. “And I don’t want to miss anything else. I want to get to know him again, I want to get to know you, I want to be an aunt to my niece and all these other children you’re going to have.” Steve blushes a bit at that. “I’m not a happy person, Steve, nor am I a particularly good one, but I’m trying. All I ask is that you give me a chance.”
Steve smiles softly at her and rests his hand over hers on the table. “I can definitely do that.”
Becca beams at him.
~
“You sure you can’t stay longer?” one of the aunts asks for the fourteenth time as Steve and Bucky pack up the car with Mia’s things, including the new elephant, accurately-named Ellie, that Becca had given Mia as a belated birthday gift. Steve is tempted to say they can - he’s come to appreciate the chaos that is the Barnes-Proctor family over the past few hours, and Mia loves all her new playmates. But Mia’s also completely worn out, and Steve can tell Bucky’s wearing thin, so he just smiles politely.
“We should really be on our way, Mia hasn’t had a nap today and she’ll be tired. It was great meeting all of you.”
They’re shuffled around for one last round of hugs. Steve notices Becca whisper something in Bucky’s ear, and he responds in turn, but Bucky doesn’t mention it when they get into the car and pull away, waving to aunts and uncles and cousins as they do so, so Steve doesn’t bring it up either.
Mia’s asleep by the time they reach the hotel. Bucky picks her up and carries her inside, Steve tagging along behind him with the bag. Once they’re in the room, Bucky lays Mia down on one of the beds, Bear and Ellie tucked under her arms, then turns and wraps his arms tight around Steve’s neck, clinging to him like a lifeline. Steve drops the bags so he can hug Bucky back.
“Thank you,” Bucky murmurs, burying his face in Steve’s neck. “Stevie, thank you, I couldn’t’ve done this without you.”
“I love you, Buck.”
Bucky lifts his head to smile at Steve. Steve grins at him.
Overall, not the worst family reunion.