A/N: Time-wise, this chapter does a bit of jumping around. There's no particular order to it; it's just a series of events I imagine happening during the Soldier's first day in the Avengers Tower.
They don't give him a third bowl of soup because they don't believe his stomach will be able to hold it. His body is full in a way he can't recall the IVs making it feel and the Soldier cannot decide if the sensation is unpleasant. He is led into the bedroom and they connect one of the IV lines back into the port. This one is antibiotics, they say, for the cuts on his leg and hand. The lacerations are almost entirely gone and the Soldier thinks it a waste of the drug, but he doesn't argue.
He anticipates a mission briefing but instead of a dossier, Sam hands him a notebook and ink pen. "Try making a list of anything that's upsetting you, and we'll see what we can do about it."
It's a mission of sorts, but the strangest in his admittedly limited memory. "Upsetting?" the Soldier repeats. The word to him means off balance, but he hasn't felt vertigo since waking up here.
"Unhappy?" Sam offers. "Uncomfortable?"
Off the Soldier's blank stare, he clears his throat and opens his mouth to try again before Stark interrupts, taking out his phone. "Listen, before you start teaching the T-800 to say "hasta la vista, baby," lemme call Pepper. I have an idea."
When he looks at the woman named Pepper, he can only focus on her hair. It makes him think of missions, of his own hair being pulled and wire around his throat. He can feel shockwaves up the metal arm and he presses his body against the headboard of the bed to keep himself from diving at her, but Pepper's smile doesn't falter.
"It's nice to meet you, Bucky," she says as she hands Stark a shopping bag.
The bag turns out to be full of books. They are large, thin, mostly made of pictures, and Stark gives them to the Soldier to read. The most relevant title, he thinks, is the one called The Way I Feel, and after he has read through it six times, carefully examining the images on each page, he thinks he understands what "unhappy" means.
The next book, A Terrible Thing Happened, is about an unhappy raccoon with bad dreams and bad memories. The Soldier reads it forty times.
He begins writing the list in Russian before realizing that his new handlers likely cannot read it. As he turns the page and starts over, the Soldier finds that he prefers writing in English. The letters form more naturally that way.
The first item on the list was going to be that he's incapable of performing self-maintenance, but another of the books from Pepper has taken care of that.
1. I don't know enough words.
"It takes a while to build up language," Sam explains as the Soldier examines the book on signing. "Especially as an adult. You'll get there, but it's gonna take time. So if you don't know a word or you're feeling too overwhelmed to speak, you can always use these, all right? We'll understand you."
The sign for "stop" is made by holding out the left hand, palm up. The side of the right hand comes down onto the left palm. He repeats it three times, executing it perfectly but still confused. "I thought this was stop?" the Soldier asks, repeating the gesture Stark had demonstrated before using the scanner.
"Only for billionaire playboy idiots," Sam says, rolling his eyes.
From the other room, Stark calls, "Billionaire playboy geniuses, thank you."
2. The bed has too much space.
"Too much space?" Sam repeats.
The Soldier shrugs, holding out his hands to demonstrate the amount of room around him in the cryo-tank. It was much tighter. He was also standing in it rather than lying down and it wasn't nearly as soft. While he does not miss the cold of the tank, the vastness and malleability of the mattress is disconcerting.
"We can get a narrower bed."
They cannot get it that day, but that night Stark is in the doorway with a blanket in his hands. He lays it on the bed and it must weigh at least forty pounds.
"It was a gift from Pepper. Supposed to help with sleeping, but funnily enough I have a problem passing out when it feels like the life's being pressed outta me. Anyway, since you're used to sleeping in a refrigerator, I thought it might help with the whole wide open spaces issue. Or not. Might make it worse, for all I know. Don't sleep with it if it does, by the way. I have this thing about preferring not to inadvertently traumatize houseguests. Weird, I know."
He is out the door again by the time the Soldier says "thank you."
The bed seems smaller with the weight of the blanket over him. The Soldier lays in the dark, trying to remember how to fall asleep.
3. I think I may injure people without orders.
4. I can't remember things.
5. I don't want to have dreams.
When Sam reads the list, he circles those three numbers and says that they can't be fixed instantly, but need to be dealt with in therapy. The Soldier knows neither that word—the translation терапия also draws a blank—nor counseling.
"You know doctors?" Sam asks.
The Soldier thinks of needles and saws and nods.
"Therapists are like doctors, but they deal with the mind rather than the body."
He sees a chair and feels shocks. The Soldier shakes his head, expecting punishment but not caring. He had promised himself he would die before he went back to that and no matter how much he wants to wipe it all away, he remembers the hurt.
"Hey." Sam's hand is hovering near him but not touching. They have yet to touch him without asking. "It won't be like anything HYDRA made you do, all right? It would be like talking, that's it. Nothing else, unless you wanted to."
"I don't speak well." He has to force out the words, mind still restrained in the chair.
"You won't even have to talk if you don't want. It would be to help you, Bucky. Nothing would happen to harm you, I promise."
But the wipes in the chair, those were to help as well.
6. I don't understand the things Tony Stark calls me.
The Princess Anastasia and Dimitri are dancing on the deck of a ship. "No," says the Dowager Countess in voiceover, "it's a perfect beginning."
Sam stops the DVD as the Soldier blinks at the screen. "Did you like it?"
"I'm Russian," the Soldier says, but that's not exactly true. "I'm…almost Russian. That is…not how things happened in Russia."
"So you don't have zombie mystics and demon trains?" Stark sighs. "Well, there go my vacation plans."
The song that the princess sang is running through the Soldier's mind as they begin the second the movie, The Wizard of Oz. He should know this story, he thinks, but the recollection floats just out of reach. The song had said things I almost remember and he begins to understand why Stark gave him the name Anastasia.
He does not write the seventh item down, because that would mean putting I miss Steve onto paper for them to see and try to resolve. The Soldier had rendered Steve unconscious last they met because it was that or crush his throat, and he doesn't want to do either of those things again.
Sam or Stark could order him not to and that might overcome it, but neither of them has given any orders of that magnitude yet. Sam keeps impressing that they aren't going to give him orders and the Soldier tries not to linger on that thought because it makes his stomach twist. Do they want him to know what he should do without asking? He can barely read his own body's signals, let alone interpret the desires of others.
Maybe they intend to teach him.
He dreams that night of a hand entwining with his own, a hand that he knows. The dream shifts until the hand is pinning him down as his arm is ripped away, sinew and skin stretching and ripping, and the Soldier wakes panting, immobile and wide-eyed. But even when his heart slows and he's verified that both the flesh and the metal arm are connected to his body, the air in the room remains familiar, as if someone else had been beside him.
A/N: Picture books are among my favorite things in the world, partially because my mother is a children's librarian but also because if you want the most relevant information in the most concise and simple terms as possible, there's no better place to get it than a picture book.
The books referenced by name in this chapter are real: Janan Cain's The Way I Feel, which is a rhyming book about various emotional states, and Margaret M. Holme's A Terrible Thing Happened, which is a book about a nonspecific traumatic event intended to help children who've experienced traumatic events of their own. Also it is about a raccoon and considering how many times I've called Bucky "Sad Raccoon Eyes" in my head that was just entirely too fitting. I imagine among the other books were Judy Hindley's How Your Body Works, which demonstrates every process of the body as if it's a machine, complete with robot illustrations, and Cornelia Spelman's Your Body Belongs to You, which is mostly about inappropriate touching, but is one of the books on that subject that also carries an overall message of general bodily autonomy and how even innocent touches can sometimes be unwelcome, and that's fine.
A lot of the things for Winter in this chapter, such as communicating through sign language and the weighted blanket, are based off of therapies and the like for autism. He isn't autistic, but being autistic myself, a number of his difficulties—such as not understanding his own emotions and not being able to read others—are similar to things a lot of neuroatypical people struggle with, and so I wrote the approach to them similarly.
Weighted blankets are also thought to help with PTSD, and I imagine Pepper would have given it to Tony after the nightmares in IM3.