I Sing the Body Electric

"I can only help you if you talk to me about it, Sergeant Barnes."

His therapist, Laura, reminds him of something he'd read in a Vonnegut novel recently. He'd lost the page weeks ago, though he remembers dog-earing it before one of his sessions to show her. When he got there, it must have straightened itself out. That, or it was another one of his Episodes, but he didn't like to dwell on it too much. (It wasn't like the time you left the stove on before going to a session. Not even as bad as forgetting you left Anthony in a bathtub for 45 minutes you absolute—)

She's a kind woman, maybe. Of course, all therapists are more or less paid to be kind, but she's always so gentle in the way she tries to take him apart. When she takes note of something she uses it to her advantage as discreetly as possible. (In one of the few sessions Bucky actually spoke, she was burning a jasmine and honeysuckle scented candle and now her office always smelled of honeysuckle and jasmine during his appointments.) She doesn't ask too many nonessential questions. She lets him ramble, but only when it's verbalized and not something rolling around in his head, left to grow like mold on bread in a cupboard. 

She's an unusually tall woman, he thinks, but aside from that, there was nothing substantial about her. Brown hair, brown eyes, brown trench coat, and skin-pink lipstick. She never wears heels to work, but has a pair tucked under her desk. She wears expensive clothes that look cheaper than they are. Thick, cable knit sweaters with triple-digit tags left on them. Soft throw blankets thrown over her couch and her chair handcrafted in countries even he'd never been to. The heels she never wore were easily worth three hundred dollars. The perfume masked by all the scents that comforted her clients wasn't even sold commercially — some Egyptian vendor had an Angolan kid from South Carolina hand-deliver it to her in the states every four months. 

She was a perfectly nice, standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high school education.

That's the one. 

"Sergeant Barnes, if you would like a new therapist—"

"I don't need a new therapist."

"If you would feel comfortable talking to someone else—"

"I wouldn't."

"Maybe if you would allow me to try other methods of therapy, I could—"

"No."

A sigh. 

She was full of those, too. They were never resigned or disappointed. They were breathy, rebellious little things that existed like tiny bubbles, sucking the air out of the room. 

"Sergeant Barnes," she says, her tone edging on weary but not quite there yet. "While I don't mean to pressure you, I feel the need to remind you that you only have eight mandatory sessions left."

He nods. "What happens after that?"

She rubs at her temple with her pen. "Well, nothing technically has to happen, but I get the feeling I won't be seeing you in my office again after that eighth session."

Bucky shrugs. "I've done thirty-two other sessions. They told me I'd only have to do twenty with the deprogramming."

"That was with the original projections," she agrees hesitantly, like she thinks she's upsetting him. "Things have changed, Sergeant Barnes. You know this."

Bucky grimaces and sets his jaw. "I'm not moving fast enough."

Laura shakes her head and visibly tries to hold in some tortured noise. "You are going at your own pace, and that is perfectly fine." She tilts her head and offers him a small smile. "We all know how hard you've worked, Sergeant Barnes. You've come a long way."

He wants to ask her if it's good enough. He wants to ask if his best is going to be able to keep everything together and get better and give Anthony everything he deserves, but he knew he's going to get the same answer and another sad smile if he does ask. He wants to ask her if they're going to take Anthony away, but he's pretty sure that even if she were able to disclose that information, she wouldn't.

(He's not sure if he wants to know, in the end, if there's nothing he can do about it anyway.)

Right, right, left.

He knows he has nothing to offer a child. He knows this is a temporary thing.

"Because you won't let us examine it, we don't really know how that arm works."

Knee tucked, leg extended, thrust.

Their situation was made to be something to help Bucky cope. Of course they would never let someone like him keep a kid. 

"Everybody in medical and biomedical engineering is currently refusing to work with you after your little outburst last week."

Right, left, left, right. It'll throw you off your rhythm but you'll be alright. 

It's for the best, really, but some part of him wants nothing more than to rip the whole world apart. "Basically, what I'm saying, is that if you break that arm, I can't guarantee you'll get another one."

"Basically, what I'm saying, is that if you break that arm, I can't guarantee you'll get another one."

Look at the kid carry the fight. 

Bucky drops his hands, takes a deep breath, and throws a look towards the door. He isn't disappointed by the sight of Nick Fury leaning on the training room doorway, arms crossed and wry smile etching itself into his face. The years absent between them only seems to have aged Nick where it counts (his eyes are more sunken in and look much heavier, his mouth looks unnatural, he's got sunspots but they only seem to make him darker-) and not in a good way. 

Bucky wants to speak but feels like he's forgotten how. 

Nick raises an eyebrow and tilts his head, assessing. "Isn't it past your bedtime?" 

Bucky's frown deepens. He can feel an itch on the back of his tongue, and wonders if that might be the words he's looking for. He hopes they're something witty or something smart or something that sounds like him at all. (He doesn't get many of those these days. He's not about to let Nick know that, though. Or, at least, he hopes he isn't.) 

"No," he says. 

Close enough.

Nick shrugs. "I'm not your babysitter anymore, so it's none of my business." (Bucky doesn't know if this is true, but he hopes so.) "They find a good home for your stray, yet?" 

That has his interested piqued. "What do you want, Nick?" 

Nick smirks. "Hello to you too."

It feels old. This loaded exchange between the two of them where Nick smirks and Bucky comes out of it knowing about as much as he did going in.

Bucky doesn't know how clever he was before HYDRA. He remembers, mostly, nothing of what occupied his head before it was filled with missions, and weaponry information, and all the ways known to kill a person and make it look like an accident. He's more Bucky than the Soldier these days, but he isn't as quick as he used to be. 

This exchange feels old, and he doesn't like it. 

Nick comes farther into the room, side-stepping abandoned mats, weights, and practice dummies. Bucky has an aborted urge to apologize for the mess but thinks better of it when he remembers that, while it's true Nick's climbed quickly up the authoritarian ladder of SHIELD, this place is no more his than it is Bucky's.

"I came to talk about Stark Industries," he says, sitting on the edge of the boxing ring closest to Bucky. "What do you think?"

Bucky turns to him. "He's five."

Nick nods. "Yeah, and the tutors and the babysitters are all telling me that he's building circuit boards and nanobots." Nick smiles fondly and shakes his head. "He's a prodigy, is what he is."

"You said I would get to decide. You said, when the time came, I would get to decide how this would happen."

Nick nods again, slower this time — decisive. "That was before circuit boards and microwave robots, Barnes. He has potential, and you're wasting it." It all sounds very accusatory when he puts it that way. Bucky doesn't know whether that's because it's supposed to sound like that, or because it's convenient for Nick. 

He decides it doesn't matter.  

"I'm protecting him," Bucky insists. "Once people know who he is, do you think anybody else is going to spare him that courtesy? I'm doing this for him—"

"For you, you mean?"

Nick is still planted on the edge of the ring. Nothing in his posture indicates a lunge, but Bucky is ready for it. His arm lags a bit, these days, but he's got literal decades on Nick. He has the Soldier; Nick is alone. 

He is the Soldier; Nick is nothing. 

It's a very simple equation, in Bucky's eyes. 

"It's not safe."

Nick looks sympathetic. His posture straightens out, but he keeps his movements projected and his arms open. "Barnes," he starts, keeping his tone neutral. "The HYDRA headquarters you were being held at was one of the last three that were actively a threat. We found and destroyed the others a year and a half ago." Nick takes a moment to run a hand over his eyes and sigh. "Besides, everyone has assumed the kid was dead for the last four years. There is no threat to his life now."

Bucky barks out a laugh. "And you don't think there will be? You go and make that announcement: 'Hey, not only is the heir to one of the wealthiest fortunes alive, but he's brilliant and will maybe be ready to start producing by the end of the ten year quarter!' He'll have targets on his back before you can finish the press conference!"

"Obviously we were going to go at it with a little more tact than that—"

Bucky is starting to feel a familiar pressure behind his eyes. His ears are buzzing, and he can barely hear himself over the noise. "And then what? What's your endgame here? It's not like he has anything to inherit, anyway. It's not like they'll just let him walk in and start running the place!"

"They will, actually."

Bucky blinks. (The pressure is only increasing and he knows what this means and he knows what this means and it's not good he needs—)

"What?"

Nick sighs and shakes his head. "Look, that's not important right now, okay? I came here because of what I promised you." Fury stands, slowly, keeping his distance. "You do have a say."

Bucky shakes his head. "Don't bullshit me, Fury."

"You have a say . . . You have a say for now. However, Anthony will have a say — along with his care providers and the Council — once a proposal is made."

(It's all fire and feedback behind his eyes.) "Fuck the Council!"

Nick rolls his eyes. "Barnes, don't be unreasonable about this."

But he doesn't know the difference anymore. His life . . . His whole self's been consumed by Anthony, and he doesn't know what is and what isn't anymore when it comes to him. (Anthony sneezed the other day and Bucky felt like the whole world was about to collapse in on itself.)

It's that, and it's the thought of Anthony having a part of himself that Bucky doesn't have access to — a part that Bucky can't protect.

(He is to be safe—)

"He doesn't speak." He's grasping at straws here. "He can listen well enough, but he doesn't speak."

Which is as true as it isn't.

Nick shrugs, and another part of Bucky cracks. "He doesn't need to speak if he knows how to write." And then a pointed look. "I know you're teaching him sign language, and that'll be good enough until we get him into some intensive speech therapy."

"What if he doesn't want intensive speech therapy?"

"He'd have to have it even if we didn't absorb him into a gifted program."

"What if he doesn't want to be absorbed into a gifted program?"

Straws. 

"Barnes," Nick starts slowly, and Bucky feels some petulant satisfaction at the vein pulsing at his temple. "This talk? This was a courtesy. I'm simply telling you about things that are going to happen. They won't start happening tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day, okay? You have time. We're going to let him be a kid for as long as we can, but that has limits. His brain will do some wonderful things, and we can't have you or anyone else compromising that." Nick shoots him another pointed look. "We especially can't have you causing us undue trouble in the mental state you're in."

Bucky feels a swell of cold wash over him and suddenly—

"You have your orders, Soldier." 

What are the orders?

"We'd hate to see anything break up such a happy little family."

He is to be safe—

He is to be cared for—

Anthony Edward Stark is to be loved.

He is cracking. 

"Apple?"

Anthony tucks his fist into the corner of a frown and twists it. His eyebrows are pinched and his expression is rigid as his eyes bore into Bucky's face. "Ah."

Bucky shakes his head and shakes the fruit again. "Apple." He punctuates by setting the apple down on Anthony's plastic table and pointing. "Apple."

Anthony frowns deeper. He goes to make a fist with his hand, but when Bucky pushes it gently away, he gets angry and mutters, "Damn."

He does this too much. 

Anthony forgets how to translate words back from ASL to spoken English the way other non-deaf five-year-olds might forget how to do the reverse. (Curses, he remembers perfectly, and that alone is bound to take years off of Bucky's life.)

His words, when he does use them, always sound jilted and skittish. Monosyllabic and direct, it's like the clown trick with the regurgitated handkerchiefs tied together. The words are knots Anthony can't help but choke on as they come out.

But they have to come out. 

Bucky sighs and moves the apple to the side. "You did apple just fine yesterday, bud. What's wrong today?"

Anthony rolls his eyes and pushes a stray curl out of his face for the fifth time. "Bored."

"You're bored?"

He nods. 

"Bored of hands?"

He shrugs. 

"Bored of me?"

Anthony launches himself across the table and doesn't let go of Bucky for the next hour and a half.

Loved.

This is that sometimes. 

Three weeks after his conversation with Nick, Anthony spends a whole day without speaking or signing.

Bucky loses fourteen hours to nothing that day.

Sometimes, when he reads Anthony stories before bed, he makes Anthony sound out the longest words on the page.

He always does it without hesitation.

He dreams about a skinny boy in New York City. 

He figures he's been to New York City, as an international assassin. He figures he might have lived in New York City, once, long ago. They live in D.C. now, he knows. Their apartment is in Georgetown and he takes Anthony walking through the cherry blossoms each spring.

But yeah, New York. 

The skinny boy is blond and has very prominent ribs. Bucky doesn't spend too much time thinking about him without the dreams, but sometimes he can't help it. He thinks he might have known the boy after waking up, maybe, but he's lost it now. 

(He's lost a lot by now.) 

He dreams of a city full of smoke and dust and the smell of the ocean and blood and dust in an apartment both too small and hot and too large and cold. Anything vaguely tangible in these dreams collapses in on itself as soon as he focuses too hard on it. Sketchbooks and charcoal fall into rows of automatic rifles and lab tables. Penicillin and cigarettes tumble into cyanide capsules and frozen sleep. 

All these things are on repeat until he can wake up. 

Sometimes he doesn't wake up.

He wants to punch Danvers' face in.

"Look, they're watching you now, alright? I mean, they were watching you before, but they are Big Brother-ing the shit out of you."

Just a little bit. 

He misses the days when Danvers was scared of her own shadow. He misses the days when they thought he was scared of his own shadow. 

(He doesn't really, but sometimes he wishes he did.)

He takes a sip of his coffee (when did he get that?) and grimaces, glancing toward the sandbox where Anthony is trying to get the attention of a redheaded child at least twice his size. "Why should I believe that?"

He knows why he should believe this. 

He lives in an apartment building owned by SHIELD that is full of SHIELD operatives. He has to report to SHIELD daily and turn over all of his written documents to SHIELD. All of anybody he considers friends works at SHIELD and over eighty percent of the people with whom he's interacted with since being released by the HYDRA base have been SHIELD. His therapist is SHIELD. 

He does believe her, but she doesn't need to know that. 

Danvers seems to see this anyway and takes a righteous sip of her coffee, turning to look at Anthony in the sandbox. "Don't ask me stupid questions."

Bucky grimaces. "Why tell me now?"

"You know why," she says, shaking her head. "You're getting worse, Barnes. You're coming apart at the seams, and if you're not careful, you'll unravel all over us."

"That's unusually poetic of you."

"They are now actively looking for reasons to prove that you are an unfit guardian. The whole 'brainwahsed assassin' bit isn't working like it used to and now they're looking for admissible proof."

"Admissible in court?" Bucky didn't know how he'd hold up in family court against a secret spy organization. 

Thankfully, Carol shakes her head. "Admissible to the Counsel."

"It was the Counsel's idea to let me keep him in the first place, wasn't it?"

It was. It was a highly controversial idea at that, but no one really seemed to mention it anymore. 

No one except for Fury and Coulson.

"No one ever liked the plan of allowing you to keep him, but they thought it would help de-condition you."

The red-headed boy is frowning at whatever Anthony is messing with in the sand. The situation doesn't look unfriendly enough for Bucky to intervene, but it's a close thing.

"They told me from the beginning that they never expected the Soldier to go away completely," He says, trying to pretend that that matters. "They knew I might never get rid of him."

"They did know that, but they thought the baby would make you less prone to using him," Carol supplies, as if it's that simple. "Now the baby's a kid, and you're no better than you were five years ago."

He doesn't think that that's fair, but he doesn't know how to deny it without lying. 

"I've improved in some places," he says, pathetically grappling the same way he did with Fury. He should really make a list of Why My Kid Shouldn't Be Taken Away From Me in the times between people trying to take his kid away from him. 

It's that or knitting for his weekly hobby, and it seems much more productive to try to keep a kid around to knit for.  

Danvers just looks sad now, which is an emotion he didn't know she was capable of. "You can't deny that you're regressing. You've been ticking off all of their boxes on the 'Bucky Barnes Is Fucked Up' list one by one."

He doesn't know what to address first. "There's a list?"

She scoffs. "Of course there's a list," she says as she shoves her available hand in front of him, listing accusations by the finger. "Obsessive behaviors, catatonic episodes, social isolation, anxiety, paranoia, hostility towards others—"

"Alright, I get it."

He doesn't get it. 

Well, he does, but he doesn't want to. He wants to go see what the hell Anthony is doing in the sand, because Anthony always creates beautiful things and he doesn't doubt that that ends with sand. (This is true.) He wants to take the the knife strapped to his thigh on the inside of his pants and shove it through the frowning mouth of the red-headed kid about to dump a bucket of sand all over Anthony. (This isn't normal.) He wants to grab Carol and Anthony and take them to an overpass on the highway and hide there in a box and a shopping cart for a few days to get SHIELD off his trail. (This is just irrational.)

He looks down at his hands. He knows that beneath his gloves one hand has blood flowing through it and one had is battery-operated. He knows both hands are covered in blood and can't be cleaned by any amount of diapers changed or sand cleaned from little brown curls and big brown eyes. 

When he looks back up, Anthony is gone.