James Buchanan Barnes could hardly remember the last time he’d shared a quiet, decent meal with his daughter. Not because he didn’t want to—God knew how many nights he lay awake wishing for it—but because time and blood had made such things rare, if not impossible.
Rani Barnes. The Shadow, they called her.
She had been born under Hydra’s ceiling, her cries swallowed by cold steel and indifferent walls. She took her first steps on tile floors stained with memory—training rooms where pain was praised and obedience was sacred. By the time most children learned their alphabet, Rani could dismantle a weapon in under thirty seconds and break a man’s finger without blinking.
She had not known lullabies, only drills. No bedtime stories—just the crack of a command and the sting of failure. She hadn’t learned to trust. She’d learned to watch. To wait. To strike. In the darkness of Hydra’s world, she became what they needed: a shadow forged in brutality, taught to hunt without hesitation, to torture without remorse, to kill without leaving a trace. A child built into a weapon.
And James—Bucky—hadn’t been there to stop it.
He stared at her across the table now, the silence between them thick with the weight of unspoken things. The soft clink of cutlery was the only sound. He watched the way she held her fork—grip too tight, posture too straight, always scanning the exits. A soldier’s meal, not a daughter’s.
He wondered, not for the first time, what kind of father he could’ve been if fate hadn’t carved both their lives into war.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Bucky asked gently, voice low like he was trying not to scare a wounded animal.
Across the table, Rani shook her head, her movements small, mechanical. She didn’t look up from the untouched food in front of her—chicken, potatoes, something warm. Something normal. He’d cooked it himself, trying to remember the way his mother used to do it. She always said food was a kind of love. Bucky wasn’t sure Rani believed in either.
He cleared his throat. “What about the new home?” he tried again. “You don’t like it?”
Still no answer. So he turned slightly, gesturing toward the wide-open windows behind them where dusk spilled in, casting long shadows across the polished wood floor. Outside stood the house—their house—given to them by the government, wrapped in red tape and guilt. A reward for survival. A burden dressed as a blessing.
“It’s nice, huh?” he added, softer this time. “Two floors. Four bathrooms. Five rooms. Backyard’s big enough to get lost in.”
Too big for just the two of them.
Especially when one of them was a nineteen-year-old girl who had never had a bedroom of her own, who had slept in steel cages and cold barracks, who had been trained to wake at the sound of footsteps and attack before she opened her eyes.
A house like this wasn’t a home—it was foreign, disorienting. Walls without cameras, windows without bars. The silence was unfamiliar. Unsettling.
Rani finally looked up, her eyes—his eyes—scanning him like a threat assessment. Her face was expressionless, but Bucky could feel the storm just beneath the surface. She didn’t say anything, but he saw the words written across her posture: Too quiet. Too clean. Too safe to be real.
He gave a weak smile, more ache than joy. “We could paint your room. Whatever color you want. Or… you don’t have to choose a room at all. You could take all five if you want.”
A beat passed.
Then, her voice, quiet and rough, barely used. “I don’t know what I want.”
And that, somehow, broke him more than silence ever could.
Bucky flinched—just barely—but she caught it. She always did. Sharp as broken glass, that girl. His girl.
“Are you gonna keep pretending this is normal?” Rani’s voice cracked through the stillness like a whip, jagged and laced with something bitter. “You? A congressman now?”
He looked down at his plate. The food had gone cold.
“What should we do?” she pressed, sitting forward now, her arms tense on the edge of the table. Her eyes weren’t accusing so much as pleading, but she didn’t know how to ask gently. She had never been taught softness. “What should I do? Where are my orders?”
There it was. The truth of her, laid bare on the kitchen table between cold potatoes and shattered illusions.
Rani Barnes didn’t know what to do unless someone told her. That was how they made her. That was how they kept her in check. A life defined by commands: wake, eat, train, kill, obey. Every step of her existence dictated by someone else’s will.
Freedom was chaos.
She didn’t want to be free. She wanted instructions. She wanted to be pointed in a direction with a clear objective and the clean promise of completion. No grey areas. No wandering. No waiting.
Bucky swallowed hard and leaned back in his chair, staring at her. She looked like a soldier who hadn’t stood down yet, still in fight mode. Still wired for war. He had no idea how to tell her that this new world—this life—had no mission brief. No target. No endpoint.
“I don’t have orders for you,” he said finally. “Not anymore.”
Her jaw clenched, and her shoulders twitched like she was bracing for impact. But the strike didn’t come.
“I don’t want to be your commander,” he added, voice gentler now. “I want to be your—” He stopped himself, the word catching in his throat like a bullet. Father. Could he even say that? Could he claim it, after all the years lost?
“I want to figure this out together,” he finished instead. “Without orders. Just… choices. You get to have those now.”
Rani looked away, and for a moment, he thought he saw her blink back something she couldn’t name. Tears or rage or the kind of pain that doesn’t scream—it simmers.
“You’re not in Hydra anymore,” he said quietly. “You’re home.”
But neither of them were sure what home meant anymore.
Rani stood up so fast her chair scraped against the wooden floor like a scream. Her fists were clenched, her breath shallow, jaw tight enough to ache. She couldn’t stay—couldn’t sit there beneath his soft eyes, couldn’t listen to his patient words about choices and freedom and painting rooms like they were some ordinary family from a forgotten decade.
No. That wasn’t her world.
She turned and stormed out before he could say her name again.
The door slammed behind her, the echo stretching longer than it should have. She welcomed it. Let it bury the ache swelling in her chest.
The streets were slick with the kind of rain that didn’t fall in storms—it just wept, slow and constant, soaking her hair and clothes until she looked like a ghost walking between streetlamps. No destination. Just distance. That was better. Distance didn’t ask questions.
She kept walking.
Midnight came and went.
Then—headlights.
A black car rolled to a stop just ahead, the engine purring like something rich and precise. Rani’s eyes narrowed. Her hand twitched toward the knife in her boot. She stepped back, just slightly, weight shifting to her heels.
The door opened.
And out stepped a woman in stilettos like she was walking a runway instead of a rain-soaked curb. An umbrella bloomed above her, sleek and black, and beneath it stood a woman with poise carved from politics and poison. Her coat was tailored, her lipstick untouched by the weather, and a streak of white split through her dark hair like lightning had once kissed her skull.
She approached slowly, her heels clicking with too much confidence, too much calm. Like she’d planned the rain, timed the entrance.
Rani tensed.
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” the woman said, her voice warm like tea but edged like a razor. “Not having a real fight. Being thrown into this… little domestic illusion.”
Rani’s jaw ticked. “What would you know?”
The woman’s smile was soft—almost sympathetic. Almost.
“Oh, I’d know a lot, actually,” she replied, her voice silk-wrapped steel. “Because I’m here as your savior.”
Rani raised a brow. Savior? That was a word she'd been taught to spit on.
The woman didn’t flinch. She stepped closer, just enough for the umbrella to shield Rani too. Her perfume was expensive and faintly predatory. She smelled like something that could smile at your funeral and bill you for the casket.
“My name is Valentina Allegra de Fontaine,” she said with a tilt of her head, like she knew the syllables would land heavy. “And I’m here to offer you… a paid escape.”
Rani blinked. “A what?”
“A paid escape,” Val repeated, enunciating like she was reading it off a velvet menu. “Fancy term for freedom with a price tag. You look like a girl who doesn’t want a bedroom. You want purpose. Lucky for you, I specialize in weaponized misfits.”
There it was. The hook in the water.
Val smiled that slow, practiced smile—the kind that didn’t reach the eyes but was perfectly shaped to disarm. With the same elegance she’d use to slip on gloves, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a sleek black business card, glossy and sharp-edged.
“Here,” she said, offering it between two manicured fingers like a secret.
Rani didn’t take it at first. Her eyes scanned it. No logo. No agency name. Just a number. Just power in its most cryptic form.
“Give me a call,” Val continued, her voice dipping into a near-whisper, like this was a seduction rather than a proposal. “If you ever miss the smell of gunpowder… and the feel of a knife in your hand.”
The rain tapped softly against the umbrella, as if pausing to listen.
Rani’s fingers closed around the card without meaning to. It felt heavier than it should, as though it carried history—or consequence.
And just like that, Val turned.
She didn’t wait for a thank you, didn’t press further, didn’t linger like the desperate do. She simply walked back to the car with her heels slicing through puddles, her coat flaring behind her like she’d just finished a performance. She climbed into the backseat without a glance back.
The car pulled away smoothly, vanishing into the fog like a promise never made.
Rani stood there, soaked and still, the card in her palm like a trigger.
For the next week, the card remained untouched—but never forgotten.
It sat in the top drawer of Rani’s new dresser, tucked beneath a folded t-shirt she didn’t wear, its glossy surface catching just enough light to remind her: you still have a way out.
Every morning, she opened that drawer. Not to touch it. Not to decide. Just to see that it was still there. That something waited for her outside this suffocating quiet.
She barely left her room. The space was too big, too clean. No hum of surveillance, no clatter of weapons. Just silence—and walls painted a color she didn’t choose.
Her father knocked. Once. Twice. Every day, without fail. Just a soft rap on the door, a pause, then his voice low and careful: “You good?”
She never answered beyond a faint “Yeah.”
He never pressed. He never lingered.
Because being a father was hard for James Buchanan Barnes. Especially now.
They’d had a moment—just one—of something resembling peace. Wakanda. A fragile stretch of quiet in a world that never stopped screaming. For a little while, he’d seemed whole. Not healed, but holding. He'd even smiled once. She remembered that. But then the sky cracked open, and the aliens came, and his oldest friend died. Steve Rogers.
And Bucky hadn’t come back from that. Not all the way.
Maybe neither had she.
Sometimes, when she could breathe past the crushing stillness of this house, Rani found herself curled up in the corner of her bed, knees pulled tight, chest aching like something ancient was trying to claw its way out. She didn't cry. She didn’t know how. But the pain was there, unspoken and endless, coiled inside her like barbed wire.
There were moments of warmth. A flicker, here and there.
Sam had dropped by once. Uncle Sam, she called him now, and he grinned when she said it. He brought her food he knew she liked, joked about her being too serious, too deadly to ever relax. She liked his voice. It cut through the fog.
But he always left. They always left.
And happiness… happiness never stayed.
She didn’t know if that was her fault or the world’s.
The worst part wasn’t the silence. It was the waiting. Like her body didn’t know how to rest, like it kept expecting a door to burst open, a command to be barked, a mission to begin. Her mind spun in patterns, hunting structure in a life that now demanded freedom. But freedom felt like drowning when you’d only ever known cages.
So she kept the card.
She didn’t call.
But she didn’t throw it away either.
It was the only thing that made sense in a world that had stopped making any.
The next day, Bucky stood outside her door longer than usual.
He didn’t knock at first. Just stood there with his hand hovering over the wood, jaw clenched, heart hammering in his chest like he was back in enemy territory. He had rehearsed what he wanted to say a dozen times in his head, each version falling apart by the time he opened his mouth. But he couldn’t keep doing this—pacing around the house, pretending the silence between them wasn’t eating him alive.
He knocked once. Twice.
When she didn’t answer, he opened the door anyway.
Rani was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside her bed, back against the wall, staring at nothing. The air was heavy with stale stillness—too many days with the blinds half-shut, the world pushed out. Her face barely flickered when she looked up at him.
“I need to talk to you,” he said quietly.
She didn’t answer.
So he stepped in and closed the door behind him. “I’m trying,” he said, voice tight, like it hurt just to say it. “I’m trying to do this right, and I can’t if you won’t let me in.”
That made her look up. Really look.
Her eyes were dark with something stormy, something breaking.
“I don’t want you to try!” she snapped, voice sharp and raw. “Because none of this feels right to me! This house, this life—you trying to be a dad all of a sudden—it's not what I know!”
Bucky stepped back like her words physically hit him. “I’m not trying to be anyone all of a sudden,” he said, steady but low. “I’m trying to be something to you. Something good. You deserve—”
“I feel trapped,” she interrupted, her voice cracking. “Don’t you get it? I can’t live like this. I need a mission. I need a purpose. I can’t wake up every day just waiting to exist. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t want to do that.”
Silence.
Only the sound of the rain again, faint against the windows. Bucky stood frozen, his breath shaking. She was trembling too, but she didn’t look away.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” she whispered. “But I wasn’t built for peace, Dad. I don’t even know what that word means.”
Bucky’s shoulders dropped. He stepped closer, slowly, like approaching a wounded animal.
“Neither do I,” he said softly. “But I was hoping we could learn. Together.”
Rani looked away, jaw clenched, eyes glassy with something unshed. Her voice was a whisper.
“I just want the pain to mean something.”
“I can’t do this,” Rani said, and her voice was colder now—clearer. Not angry, not wounded, just done. “I can’t pretend this is fine, because it’s not. I need space. I need time to be alone and… most of all, I need a purpose.”
She stood up before he could say a word, her movements sharp and practiced. The kind of precision that didn’t come from peace—it came from years of survival.
Her bag was already by the door. Packed, silent. Not with much. Just enough.
She slung it over her shoulder and started walking through the long hallway of that too-big house. Her boots echoed on the hardwood floors. It wasn’t a home. It was a cage with curtains. Clean, quiet, empty. Every room a reminder of what she wasn’t built for.
Bucky didn’t follow.
He stood still in her doorway, his expression unreadable. And maybe that hurt more than if he’d yelled. Maybe it hurt that he didn’t say, stay.
But she wouldn’t have listened anyway.
Her fingers brushed the edge of her bag as she walked—she knew the card was inside. She had placed it there that morning, hours before the argument, as if some part of her had already decided. As if she’d known the peace wouldn’t last. That the walls would press in. That the silence would scream louder than any order Hydra ever gave her.
By the time she stepped into the rain, the sun was already setting—drenched in bruised purples and blood-colored clouds. The streets glistened with water, cars sweeping by, the world carrying on as if nothing was breaking.
She didn’t look back.
She reached the end of the block. Pulled the card out. The paper was stiff, unaffected by her touch. But her hands trembled.
She stared at the number. Took a breath.
Then she dialed.
The line clicked. A pause.
“This is Rani Barnes,” she said, her voice steady. Steel. Hollow.
The silence on the other end stretched just long enough for her heart to thud once, deep and slow.
Then came the voice—smooth, calm, like velvet laced with danger.
“I was wondering when you’d call.”
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