Chapter Sixteen
Bucky wakes with a throbbing headache. He's not sure what time it is, but light is coming through the cracks in his shutters and he can smell the pungent stench of disinfectant over puke and the events of last night come back to him in fuzzy portions. He remembers Natalia and talking to her in his bedroom. He remembers her eyes, so angry. He remembers littering the kitchen counter with beer bottles and probably spilling a few.
He thinks of Stevie, still in his crib, and panic seizes him. What time is it? How long has he been there? Is he alright? Bucky bolts out of bed and feels all at once as though his brain has been hit with a sledgehammer and he slows down and groans. He feels his ears pop.
Still, Bucky hauls himself out of bed and stumbles into the hall and races into Stevie's room to find the crib empty. He stares for a minute and wipes hair out of his face and stares again.
"Stevie…," Bucky breathes. "Stevie? Stevie?!"
He bursts out of the bedroom and stops when he hears Natalia's voice from the living room calling his name and he freezes. In his head, he curses. She's still here? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? He's not sure.
He finds Natalia and Stevie in the living room, sitting on the couch. Natalia's got Stevie on her knee and she's reading him a picture book and she looks up at him when he stumbles in. Her glare is poisonous.
"Uh, good morning," he tries awkwardly and Natalia looks back down at Stevie.
"Look, little guy, your daddy finally rolled out of bed," she says in a voice too cheerful for the accusation in her words. "He missed work this morning, too." She glares back up at him. "Isn't that something."
Bucky isn't sure what to say. He finally decides on mumbling, "I feel sick."
"Yeah, me too," Natalia replies and eyes him, then turns back to Stevie and starts to continue their story. "Go get some water and a Tylenol and then you and me are gonna have a chat," she says to him without looking up and Bucky grinds his teeth together.
"Sure thing, boss," he grumbles under his breath, but he does what he's told.
He ducks into the bathroom to look in the mirror afterwards and instantly regrets it. His hair is stiff with sweat and his eyes are red and bloodshot. His skin is pasty and yellow and he looks like any second he might puke again. He runs some water over his face and brushes the taste of bile off his teeth and returns to Natalia with his hair tied in a knot at the back of his neck.
She makes him wait for her to finish reading to Stevie, then she sets him down and hands him a stuffed animal and finally looks back up at Bucky. Bucky instantly looks away.
"Did you know Stevie had an asthma attack this morning?" She says flippantly and Bucky looks up again immediately, worried.
"What?" He says. "Is he alright, did you find his medicine?"
"Yeah, I did," Natalia says. "He's fine now, but it definitely could have killed him if, say, his daddy was too hungover in bed to notice."
"Are you just here to give me a lecture, because that's not really what I'm looking for right now," Bucky replies venomously after a few seconds of hesitation and he tries not to let on to the way her words really cut into him. She was right. He'd failed Stevie.
He could have let his baby die. He wasn't a suitable parent.
He was neglectful.
He felt a new angle of self-hatred take root in his heart.
"You owe me a huge thank you," Natalia replies and she's so angry. He backs down immediately. "You could have killed yourself and your son all in one go."
Bucky looks down at the carpet and starts blinking hard. He swallows loudly.
"Bucky, you can't just check out," Natalia says, leaning in to him. "You can't just disappear for a day, it doesn't work like that. You have a son who needs you, do you understand that?"
"Of course I understand that," Bucky replies weakly and Natalia frowns.
"Then why did you do this?" She cries. "Why did you make yourself unavailable, when you have a thirteen month old across the hall? And a sick one at that!"
Bucky feels awash with shame.
"I-I," he says.
"I know you've just been sacked and that's hard, but it's absolutely no excuse," Natalia continues. "No excuse at all. What would a good father do?"
Bucky looks up at her, his features hard.
"How would I know?" He asks and she looks at him and sucks in her bottom lip.
Finally, she says, "you're better than this," and Bucky looks away again.
He knows she's right. He's starting to think of his father now and thinking about him makes Bucky want to throw up all over again. He's not his father, violent and hateful. He's not, he's not.
"They're gonna take Stevie," he says.
"What?" Natalia says and Bucky thinks it's not possible for his shoulders to sink lower, but they do.
"Child services will show up and I'll have to tell them I'm unemployed and they'll take the baby away and put him in an orphanage. Just take him away from me, just like that. They've been looking for a proper excuse for months and now they've got one," he says.
"That's not going to happen. We won't let them take him," Natalia says but he doesn't think she understands. If they find even one reason Bucky might not be a suitable parent, they'll dive in and steal him away in a second. They'd do it in a heartbeat.
"It doesn't work like that," he says. "If they think they can take him then there's nothing we can do at that point."
Natalia seems to be at a loss.
"And I'll have to rip up the contract for my arm, too," Bucky adds. "I can't pay for a prosthetic now-can't believe I ever had the guts to think I could."
"Don't do that, not just yet," Natalia tells him. "You can find another job, maybe you can still make all those payments. It's a pink slip, not a death sentence." Bucky scoffs darkly. "Everything isn't over just yet," she continues and her voice softens.
"Well, it feels pretty over to me," he says. "Maybe they can find another home, maybe they have people who'll be better for him than me," he adds, about Stevie. "Somebody who can give him the attention and the love and home he deserves."
"Bucky!" Natalia cries. "How dare you! Are you going to give up?"
"What else can I do?!" Bucky cries and Natalia scoops Stevie up off the ground again and cuddles him close.
"You can keep fighting!" Natalia cries. "Look for more work!"
"There's nowhere for me to go!" Bucky replies. "I had that job because people pitied me, not because I was good at it! I can't even stand in unemployment lines because I'm disabled! There's no jobs there I could do!"
"There has to be something," Natalia replies adamantly and then she squeezes Stevie to her tighter. "Don't give up on your baby. Don't let him go to an orphanage Bucky, you're his daddy, don't let him live that life."
Bucky bites his lip hard but he can't stop tears from running down his face and he's mortified that he's breaking down right in front of her.
"I don't know what else to do," he admits finally and then he leans over his knees and covers his face with his hand and shakes. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know. "I'm so sorry," he finally says to her through his tears. "For last night. For this morning. I'm sorry." Natalia stays quiet. "I don't deserve a friend like you, I really don't."
"Thank you for apologizing," she finally says.
"Did you stay here last night?" He asks.
"Right here on this couch," she says and out of the corner of his eye he sees her shrug. "I couldn't leave the baby." He looks over a little and she grins. "I couldn't leave Stevie, either." Admittedly, this makes Bucky smile a little and he lets out a breath through his nose.
"Good one," he breathes.
"Zing," Natalia says and it takes a few seconds for both of their smiles to fade back into frowns. Then, she changes the subject. "There's something else we need to talk about," she says.
"Is there an eviction notice pasted on my door?" Bucky asks. "Is the world ending tomorrow?"
"You said something to me last night before you went to sleep and I just…," she frowns. "It concerned me and I just wanted you to know you'd said it." Bucky looks up at her.
"Oh, no," he says. "Did I insult you? I want you to know I don't actually think anything bad about you ever, Nat, I think you're perfect. I was so drunk out of my mind, I wasn't making sense-"
"It was about the army," Natalia says quietly and Bucky stops. He stares at her and a chill starts at the top of his head and runs down his whole body. He can't answer for a while.
"What did I say," he finally asks in a voice more like a whisper and Natalia looks down at Stevie, whose fallen asleep in her arms and doesn't look back up.
"You just kept talking," she says. "You wouldn't shut up and I knew you were going to say things you'd regret, so I just left you there. If you're gonna tell me these things, I want you to decide to tell them to me completely sober, not accidentally let them all slip in a drunken haze. It's not fair to you."
"What did I say?" Bucky cries. He's feeling fear make the hair on his arm stand and he doesn't know what he told her, doesn't know what she knows about him. Natalia stares down at Stevie's sleeping face and glances back up at him quietly.
"You told me you didn't have a name," she says. "That those seven years, you were some sort of amnesiac and they wouldn't let you have a name."
Bucky looks at her and doesn't know what to do. It's not everything and it's not among the worst things he could have told her, but it's a window into the blackness of his past. It's like she's looking at him now as he was then, this nameless, inhuman monster in chains. His mouth goes dry. He doesn't want her to know who he was. He doesn't want her to know how they treated him. Then maybe, anxiety in his gut whispers, she'll realize they were right and she'll leave you. She'll realize you're worthless because they made you that way.
He's not sure how long they sit there in silence, but it feels like years.
"I just wanted you to know you'd said it," she adds quietly.
Finally, Bucky moves, swallows, stands.
"Are you going to stay?" He asks quietly and she looks up at him. She must be taking in his sallow cheeks, his bloodshot eyes, the way he looks dead, because she nods a second later.
"You and Stevie still need me," she says and with this, Bucky starts to back out of the living room.
"I'm gonna go back to bed," he says. "You can put Stevie in his crib if you want."
"I hope you feel better when you wake up," she says to him quietly and he just nods and turns and hastily makes his way back to his bedroom, where he turns out all the lights and draws the shutters closed tighter and collapses on his bed with a pillow over his head.