Chapter Twenty

Natalia stays there for the rest of the day because she doesn't have rehearsal and Bucky is in dire need of a shoulder to cry on. He loves having her there and they talk and flirt and kiss and just spend time together for hours. He loves even the moments they lapse into quiet, because she's near him and her presence is so comforting.

They make lunch together and when Stevie wakes up, they feed him and sit on the floor and play with him, rolling a ball back and forth between the three of them, and Bucky often finds himself lost in Natalia's beautiful face, her smile, as she teases a giggling Stevie. He wishes it could be like this forever.

They leave Stevie with a few more toys and books while Bucky gets up to bring him a snack, and Natalia follows him into the kitchen because she's currently kissing his face and winding her fingers around the hair at the nape of his neck. Bucky's trying to fumble through the cupboard for a cup of applesauce, but he's almost entirely consumed by Natalia's breath in his breath and after a second, his hand drops and wraps itself around her waist. Her body against his feels perfect, like they were meant to be. He loves her. He loves her!

But he can still hear Stevie making noises in the next room, just unsupervised enough to be unsafe, and he pulls himself away from her, shaking his head and grinning. He turns back to the cupboard.

"Cut it out, we're supposed to be playing with that kid," he says and she laughs.

"I can multitask!" she cries and he scoffs, taking a small cup of applesauce and a spoon down and turning again to walk away from her.

"Sure," he teases while Natalia follows him from behind.

When they get back into the TV room, Stevie is holding onto his toes and rolling himself around the floor. Bucky is starting to lean down to scoop him up.

"Wait, turn around," Natalia says, taking his shoulder and stopping him, smiling playfully. "I want to read your tattoo." Bucky looks back at her, setting the applesauce on the arm of the couch, confused.

"What are you talking about?" He says. "I don't have any tattoos."

"Then what's that?" Natalia asks and she reaches up with her free hand and brushes the back of his neck, just under his hairline. "I thought I saw something."

Bucky begins to feel ill.

"I've never been tattooed," he says and Natalia looks at him and her smile falls as she sees the sick look on his face and he lets her walk around him slowly. He feels her fingers on the back of his neck again and she's silent and all he can hear is his own breathing and Stevie saying 'buh-buh-buh'. "What is it?" He asks quietly, but he has a feeling he at least knows where it came from. He's stunned at how quickly their playful atmosphere has fallen.

"I'll take a picture," she says and pulls out her phone and when she shows him the screen, he feels his stomach turn.

Just below his hairline, in small print, his skin reads, "property of hydra".

He takes her phone from her and deletes the picture and hands it back, and then he puts his hand on the back of his neck and turns so she can't see it anymore.

"It's from…," Natalia whispers and she doesn't have to finish her thought because they both know what she's thinking and he nods. He thinks he must be slowly losing the color in his face; he can practically feel it.

"I didn't know…," he says. "Years walking around like this and I had no idea…"

"Bucky," Natalia breathes and the way she's looking at him, he feels scrutinized. She looked at him like this after his flashback attack at the pediatricians and she looked at him like this when he first told her where he'd learned Russian. He doesn't like it, but he can't blame her. "What happened to you?"

His mouth dries up and he thinks he'll really have to tell her this time and he's so scared he could cry. He stares at her, his hand on his neck and his face white and she looks at him expectantly. She really wants to know. He really has to tell her this time.

"If you know," he finally manages to whisper. "You'll never want to see me again. You'll be disgusted with me."

"Let me be the judge of that," Natalia tells him gently. Tears spring to his eyes.

"Please don't leave me," he says before he can stop himself.

"Bucky, from what I've gathered, something absolutely horrific happened to you," Natalia says. "I just want to help."

Bucky just nods quietly and then he looks down and they wait there for a long time for him to gather up the courage to speak again. He picks up the applesauce and bends down next to Stevie, who stops and hobbles over to collapse in Bucky's lap and open his mouth expectantly. Bucky can't smile. He kisses the top of Stevie's head and opens the applesauce and Natalia sits down opposite him.

"The third battle I'd ever fought in," he whispers, taking a small spoonful of applesauce to put into Stevie's mouth. "I got caught in an explosion. It threw me backward. I hit my head and cracked my skull and the people around me, they must have thought I was dead. They must have left me. But I don't know the whole story because the next thing I knew, I was waking up in a cell with chains on me." He stops here because the further and further he gets, the harder it becomes to say the words. The more he can feel his heart speeding up, his breath starting to quicken. He can see it all, like it happened yesterday. He takes a deep breath. Stevie looks up at him, twisting his little head and putting his hands on Bucky's, where the empty spoon is. He demands more applesauce, so Bucky obliges, but his hand is starting to shake.

Natalia puts her hand on his knee and he looks up at her, searching her face.

"I'm sorry," she says and he wets his lips. He tries to force a laugh.

"That's not the horrific part," he whispers. "It's not even close."

"Do you want to stop?" She asks. "Is it too much?" She looks concerned. He takes another breath in, lets it out.

"No," he says and he looks down at the cup of applesauce and picks up another spoonful. "You ought to know, it's only fair."

"Only if you want to tell me," she says. "Only if you think you can do it."

"I can," he says, he swears, but he's still not sure he necessarily wants her to know. He doesn't think he'll ever want her to know. He's never been more ashamed of anything in his entire life. He doesn't think anything could make him hate himself more.

But he continues anyway.

"I remember everything being gone," he tells her. "In my head. Who I was, who I fought for, where I came from. I felt like a blank slate and thinking about it actually physically hurt."

"Amnesia," Natalia says.

"Brain trauma," Bucky says. "The scar is still there, you know," he adds and he knows if he were to reach up, he could feel it underneath his hair, a long, thick, raised line. It weaves across the back of his head like a seam. "Sometimes I wish they would have let me die there."

Natalia says nothing. He doesn't think there's anything she could say. Stevie has stopped babbling, but he's still eating, and Bucky gets him out another spoonful before Stevie overturns the cup onto the carpet.

"I don't know how long they kept me chained up like that," he admits. "I don't remember much. I was pumped full of drugs ninety-five percent of the time and I was confused and scared and panicked. Most of it's a blur. I remember they broke my legs at first so I couldn't go anywhere. I remember they all spoke in languages I couldn't understand."

"Why did they want you?" Natalia asks and Bucky can't meet her eye.

"You know," he says. "You can make a lot of money off a guy who only knows how to be a soldier. If you torture him enough, confuse him enough. He'll kill anybody for you, do everything you ask, just cause he has no moral compass anymore. No autonomy anymore. Has no idea what he's doing." He's not sure what face Natalia's making now because he doesn't think he can look up. He doesn't want to see her. He stares at the ground. "And they have so many ways of making you compliant. So many ways of making you confused and dependent and scared all the time, to the point where you don't even know how to say no anymore. I was their go-to guy, their loaded gun. I think at one point, they started selling me. Getting shady people to pay them money and then I'd go off whoever they wanted me to. That's all I was for years. Almost a decade. I wasn't a human being, I was a lethal weapon."

He's not feeling anymore. He's shut it off. He's just staring at the ground, saying words and trying to distance himself more and more from the truth behind them. His voice has become a monotone. He feels shelled out. "Seven years of that nearly killed me. If I'd known how to want things, I would have wanted to die." He tries to pick up another spoonful of applesauce for Stevie, but the spoon falls out of his hand and spills applesauce on the floor. Stevie bursts into tears and Bucky sits there, frozen, and wraps his arm around Stevie.

Natalia jumps up and brings a towel back from the kitchen to wipe up the mess. After she does, she takes over the job of spooning food into Stevie's mouth, scooting closer to him and Bucky.

She's a good listener. He still hasn't once met her eyes, but she's stayed quiet and let him talk.

In addition, he's grateful for the way he's able to cut out his own heart. He thinks if he had felt every word he'd said so far, if he hadn't distanced himself, he wouldn't have been able to make it. The consequence is that he feels a deep, resonating hollowness. He feels dead. He leans down and kisses Stevie's head gently.

"I almost got my wish, because when I fell off that train trying to complete one of their awful missions for them, they didn't want me anymore. I was dying, I was broken. They could sew up my head, but they couldn't put my arm back on and they'd rather I died there.

"That was the first time I'd begged them to take me back. I was going in and out of consciousness, all I could see was red, but I knew if they left me, I'd bleed out all alone. I was so scared. I begged them, I screamed, I wept, and they turned around and left.

"I don't remember being found. I remember sobbing and blacking out and waking up slowly in a hospital. I told you about that part, didn't I? Waking up and seeing that this was all I had?" He glances at his shoulder and back again at the ground. He doesn't wait for Natalia to respond. "I still didn't know who I was. They wouldn't tell me, you know? Wouldn't give me a name because I wasn't allowed to have that much of an identity, that kind of personhood. They had a codename for me, something really anonymous and empty, but um," Bucky bites his lip and swallows. "I don't wanna say it. I don't wanna hear it ever again.

"The people at the hospital identified me after a while, told me my name was James and I was an American man who'd supposedly died years ago. They tried to call my family, but my dad was already dead by then and I don't think he would have come anyway. They told Joseph and Sarah, Stevie's parents, and they came for me. I didn't recognize them and I wouldn't even let them touch me and I broke their hearts, but they were still so kind to me.

"I was a real mess, Nat. I was falling apart. I went through loads of therapy, and I probably still should be, but I couldn't take it anymore. My mind came back to me in chunks until I remembered everything I'd lost and honestly, I'm still trying not to fall to pieces. It was two years ago, Natalia, just two years. Sarah and Joseph died a year ago and left me Stevie and sometimes I still wake up and think someone's gonna come and tie me back up again, break my legs again, break my whole mind again. I think sometimes that I deserve it. For all the people I killed. For all the courage I didn't have to tell them no." He finally looks at her and notices that she's crying. Her face is red and her cheeks are wet and she's looking at him with the most heartbroken expression he's ever seen. Stevie has stopped crying, but he's hiccupping now, and he wraps his little fingers around Bucky's wrist. He feels Stevie press a kiss to his hand. "I'm not a person, Nat," he says. "I'm a trainwreck. I'm a car accident. I'm one bloody, broken mistake after the other." He looks down at the ground and takes a breath, breathing out into Stevie's fine, thin hair. "So now you know."

Natalia opens her mouth and sobs out loud and then clamps a hand over her face. "I don't even know what to say," she says, her voice thick with tears, the applesauce spoon empty and neglected in one hand.

In all honesty, he doesn't know either, and so he only shrugs his shoulder half-heartedly and stares into the carpet unseeingly. He feels nauseous.

He's recounted this story a hundred times to a hundred different doctors and therapists, and he's even gone into greater detail, describing the torture and the killing and the drugs and the way he lost his entire self day by day until he was nothing, and talking about it always made him feel sick, but he's never felt so bad as he does now. He figures he's never told the story to someone he really loves before and that makes a big difference.

He wants to vanish. He wants to disappear into the floor. He wants to stop existing.

He picks his arm up from around Stevie and presses his face into the crook of his elbow and squeezes his eyes shut so tightly he can see stars. He can hear Natalia sniffling across from him and then when she leans forward and touches him and he doesn't see, he tenses up and jumps, starting to tremble, staring at her defensively. In his lap, Stevie is thrown a little by him and he starts to scream.

Bucky hasn't jumped at anyone touching him in a long time. He suddenly feels panic that he might be moving backwards. Natalia takes her hands away the second she can tell she's scared him and he can't bring himself to look at her. Instead, he puts his arm back around Stevie and nuzzles his face into his hair.

"Shh," he whispers. His voice shakes. Stevie turns himself around and raises his arms and Bucky takes the cue to scoop him up. Steve latches onto his neck as tightly as he possibly can and bawls.

They all sit there for another few minutes until Stevie's calmed himself back down into hiccups again and Bucky pats his back. He stares at the ground and addresses Natalia again.

"So," he croaks once he's gathered up the strength to speak. "Now you know. What now?"

"What do you mean?" Natalia asks and he realizes he's physically bracing himself for her to leave. He's got his shoulders up and tense near his ears and he's practically holding his breath as he rubs Stevie's back. She's seemed understanding so far, sure, but he doesn't want to be surprised when she breaks his heart.

"I mean, at what point are you going to start running as far away from here as you possibly can?" Bucky says.

"I'm not going to," Natalia says and she almost sounds incredulous. He wonders if she heard him correctly. He killed people. He looks up at her. "Don't start thinking I'm going to leave you, Bucky," she says. "That's ridiculous, I'm going to stay right here."

"I don't deserve you," Bucky whispers and Natalia swipes at her cheeks and takes a deep breath and shakes her head, scooting over to slowly and gently wrap her arms around him. Although he's still tense and afraid, he lets her, leaning back into her embrace and trying to relax until all three of them are a puddle on the carpet, holding each other.

"Don't be silly," she tells him and she brings her knees up, turning and holding him closer, practically snuggling both him and Stevie to her. She kisses his hair. "I'm staying here."

[Overview for those who haven't heard: I'm leaving on an LDS mission to California very, very soon, and that means no internet and no writing time. All my blogs and writing profiles will be on 'pause', if you will, for the 18 months I'm gone and then will be reactivated with new material when I return around Oct or Nov of 2016.]

The day I had to finish What the Water Gave Me, I realized that I was really. really. really pressed for time. I have to stop writing on the 29th, but I travel to Provo on the 27th and technically, I should be done by then and that only gives me 8 days! 8 days to finish this entire novel that's only just barely reached anything like a midpoint. When I started posting this and made my plan, I guess I naively thought that hard work could overcome a severe lack of time and that I could write two full-sized novels in a little over a month and I was wrong. :/ So now I guess I have to admit that I'm sort of panicking.

There's no way Stevie will be finished before I leave. But I've never been in a situation like this before, so what do I do? I can't take down the whole story and save it for later-that just seems silly, given that it's already up. But I can't leave it up and unfinished because that feels unprofessional and irresponsible and I wanted to be a writer who always finished what she started. I hate seeing stories on hiatus and I hate even more putting stories on hiatus, but I guess I'm really without options.

What is everyone's opinion about this? Does anyone have any more ideas? As of right now, I guess my plan is that I'll post everything I have and then hiatus this story for a solid 18 months and hope I can finish it up when I return and I just feel awful about it. What do you think? -BlitheBells