Chapter Text
Bucky does not like this. Not one bit. He checks the exit at the end of the hallway, which leads back the way he came. Through that door, they’ll all be sitting there, probably expecting him to come slinking back, to chicken-shit out again. Maybe some talk about money changing hands will happen very, very quietly. Steve will smile and maybe say “Maybe next week, pal,” like he did last time. The rest will look at him like “What the hell?” because they really like Steve and are sick of seeing him disappointed. Nobody will actually say such a thing to Bucky, because Bucky’s sure they’re all at least a little afraid of him. Maybe not Steve.
But maybe Steve. Bucky can’t get a valid read on him. He tries, but the guy’s all smiles of various intensities and stories and attempts at reassurance. His face is like the windows at Bucky’s old apartment, taped over with newspaper. The funnies section. Or maybe a human interest story about a little boy who spent all his allowance money to feed homeless people bologna sandwiches. There’s light behind it, yes. Steve seems to be made of pure light sometimes - his eyes, his smile.
But Bucky knows that like any good soldier who has been to war and back, Steve has a box full of the bad stuff – grief, remorse, guilt, anger, a slew of terrible memories and emotions he hasn’t processed. The box gets stuffed under the bed, maybe in the back of the closet. Steve hasn’t let on that such a thing exists for him, but Bucky knows better. Bucky’s original box, the one from his old life, is now nothing but a shredded tangle of was-box, an artifact from when one modest box was actually enough to hold all the bad. He had to find a new box, an industrial shipping container, to put all this Hydra mess in. Keeping that thing from blowing apart – from blowing him apart – is almost a full-time job.
Bucky’s also pretty sure that some of the stuff in Steve’s box is about him. Steve has alluded to the worries he has, but he’s been careful not to provide a lot of substantive evidence that Bucky causes him heartburn. Bucky doesn’t even know how to begin to broach the subject. All of his human relations files have been corrupted, and he’s not highly motivated to fix them. The wall between Steve and him is actually pretty comfortable. Safe. For everyone.
He startles when he hears a sudden noise down that hall. Startle doesn’t show much in his body; he’s got a good handle on that. They made him get a good handle on that. Only his blue eyes dart right to glance in the direction of the sound. He feels a surge of electricity throughout his body, his limbic system spooling up like a wild motor that has time and again propelled him violently toward whomever was unfortunate enough to be in his way.
Although he wore a mantle of solid menace when activated, nobody but his programmers and handlers knew that the Winter Soldier was powered by pure fear. Why rewrite nature’s little survival handbook? Why not simply harness the power of evolution itself? Too easy. Just like Little Albert, if he was a homicidal maniac.
Sleep. Clang. Food. Clang. Human contact. Clang. Question orders. Clang. Violate mission parameters. Clang. Remember certain things. Clang. Forget certain things. Clang.
The noise is Sam. Laughing. Good lord, that laugh. Is it even real? Is it an actual reflection of joy? Bucky thinks it might be a little too loud. He wonders if something darker kicks it up a notch, a minuscule overcompensation. What’s underneath? Sad? Empty? Maybe it’s real. Maybe there’s nothing underneath but happy. Bucky tries to remember if he ever laughed like that, what was underneath it.
… Yeah… Yep. That guy laughed a lot.
Underneath? He can’t really remember.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Down that hall and out that exit, Steve, Wanda, Sam, Clint, and Scott are sitting in the communal living room in the guest wing of T’Challa’s palace. Steve has his gaze trained to the door they saw Bucky go through about five minutes ago, as if staring at it will ensure that Bucky doesn’t walk back out anytime soon.
“I hope he stays this time,” Wanda says. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch next to Clint. An open magazine sits on her lap, but she hasn’t looked at it since Bucky went back.
“Me too,” Clint says. “The guy definitely needs help.”
“A lot of help,” Sam mutters under his breath.
“He’ll stay,” Steve says.
Sam snorts. “What makes you think so? Why this time?”
“I just know it.”
“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,” Sam counters. “He’s 0 for 4 so far. I give him three minutes before he walks through that door.”
“Can you really blame him? Last time he sat across from a shrink alone, things went pretty bad, right?” Scott says.
“This guy’s different, starting with being an actual psychiatrist,” Clint says.
“Psychologist,” Steve corrects.
“Whatever. He’s got a license. And he’s good.”
“I’ve never seen such a young person try to look like such an old person. It’s like he saw a picture of his granddad and said ‘yeah, that’s the look I’m gonna go for,’” Scott says.
“It’s the style now,” Wanda says.
“Where? In the lumberjack community?” Sam asks. “The chubby, bald lumberjack community?”
Clint crosses his left ankle over his right knee. “As long as he can get the job done.”
“Job? Barnes is not a busted water heater,” Sam replies. “I don’t think anyone can fix,” he pauses and makes a gesture toward the door, “you know, all that.”
“You’re quick to sell him short,” Steve says, frowning at Sam.
“And I think you overestimate him sometimes,” Sam says. “Look, I know he’s your friend, but you’re blind if you can’t see that – ” He stops himself.
“See what, Sam?”
Sam looks down at his hands, then back up at Steve. “That he’s messed up. Like, really messed up.”
“He’s made progress,” Clint says. “He worked his ass off for those first six weeks.”
“The stuff the docs asked him to do, man,” Scott says, shaking his head. “I never could have done that. It was pretty much the worst thing ever to watch.”
“Damn right,” Clint says.
“This is different,” Sam says. “He’s really good at following orders. Doing things that people tell him to do. But therapy’s a whole different animal.”
“Is Dr. Bard even a therapist?” Wanda asks.
“Well, his CV could be on the university’s website,” Steve says, referring to the university in Wakanda’s capital where Dr. Bard is a visiting professor. He finally takes his eyes off the door to reach for the tablet on the coffee table in front of him.
Sam and the others pull out their phones to look as well.
“UCLA undergrad, Boston University Ph.D. in clinical psychology,” Wanda reads.
“The guy graduated UCLA in 2005. God, he’s probably only in his early thirties,” Clint says. “So young. So bald.”
“Three years of training at the VA National Center for PTSD in Boston,” Sam says. “Impressive.”
Steve scans down the CV. “He’s worked in Rwanda, the Hague, and Bosnia. Published a bunch of stuff on genocide and…perpetration trauma? I’m not sure what that is.”
“I think it’s when you’re traumatized because you do bad things to other people,” Sam guesses. “Maybe Beardo is just gonna hug him and say ‘it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault’ over and over until Barnes starts crying. Boom! Cured.” He smiles broadly. “Can you even imagine that?”
“C’mon, Sam,” Steve chides gently.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not actually a cure for psychological trauma,” Scott says. “Though I think if Robin Williams ever hugged me like that, all my problems would go away forever.”
Wanda looks over at Steve. “Dr. Bard seems like a good fit for him.”
“Sure does,” Steve agrees quietly. “Just gotta get him through that second door.”
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Although he’s been through most of the grueling deprogramming process… well… not a lot has actually changed. While he was in cryo, the Wakandans and Steve’s Avengers – ornery and energized after being busted out of the Raft – made pretty fast work of figuring it all out. Someone made the inspiration suggestion to go back to Siberia and collect every shred of paper, every hard drive, and every piece of equipment that wasn’t destroyed as they tore the place apart during their fight. The team made several trips there with the Quinjet and unloaded the whole macabre collection into a hangar just south of the main complex where they were all staying.
They also brought back what was left of Bucky’s arm. He was surprised that Stark hadn’t taken it so that they couldn’t reverse engineer it. It was probably an oversight. Stark was probably too woozy with rage and pain after seeing the guy next to him brutally murder his parents with emotionless precision. Having his parents’ murderer and his friend then tag-team him afterwards and beat the crap out of him probably didn’t help things, either.
After they raided the Siberian bunker, the team sifted through a staggering number of boxes full of mission reports, medical records, experimental data, and meticulously documented programming procedures. Since nobody on the team was fluent in Russian except Bucky, Natasha created and emailed a cheat sheet of key words and phrases so they could separate out the different categories of documents. Steve was able to make his way through Zola’s notes with his knowledge of French and German.
The documents were scanned into a computer and run through a translation program. They were then encrypted and restricted only for the use of the consultants T’Challa hired to short circuit whatever was in Bucky’s brain that allowed him to be primed for orders using that ten word sequence. Steve had been the one to insist on the encryption and strict compartmentalization, Bucky later learned.
The thoroughness of the records helped the consultants crack the Bucky Code with Hydran efficiency. It only took them three months to sort, translate, and interpret the documents and put together a plan of action. Then they woke Bucky from cryo and brought him up to speed. All the stuff they salvaged also would serve another purpose, according to Sam:
“If the Americans, Russians, or whoever eventually track you down and decide to hold you accountable for all that Winter Soldier stuff, this is all gonna save your ass.”
Bucky couldn’t even begin to think about that, but it sounded smart. Good strategy.
The psychologist consultant T’Challa hired to help with the deprogramming was something else. “Doc Beardo,” most of them called him behind his back, since he has no hair on his head but a mighty outcropping of it coming from his face. The moniker stuck so powerfully that Bucky doesn’t even remember what the man’s real name is.
“I bet he uses conditioner on it,” Wanda said to Bucky during one of her many attempts to strike up conversation with him.
Doc Beardo explained to Bucky and the team that Bucky was the way he was because of conditioning (the psychological kind), and that the way to deprogram him was to “target the processes and environmental cues that facilitated that conditioning.”
Repetition – reinforcement = extinction = good, Beardo wrote on a white board for all of them. Using the information they gathered from Hydra’s records, they would replicate the conditions of programming and run through the priming sequence over and over again, without providing any of the reinforcements that trained the Winter Soldier to prime to receive orders in the first place.
“There’s a lot more to what they did,” Beardo explained, “but this will at least make it so that someone can’t say a bunch of words and hijack your mind. Which is your goal, right Mr. Barnes?” He looked at Bucky expectantly. Bucky responded with a nod.
So Bucky had to sit in The Chair over and over again, which they had reconstructed from the paper schematics and whatever they could dig from the rubble. Someone had to inject him with The Paralytic over and over again, titrated to the same level Hydra used, which was high enough to prevent major injury but also tempered quickly by his accelerated metabolism. He had to chomp down on The Guard and put his head in The Vise over and over again, though because of the obvious deleterious effects of The Vise, they rigged it to emit only a low voltage electrical current that would cause discomfort but no damage.
The cognitive science consultant told them that The Vise was probably based on the early research on electro convulsive therapy in the ‘30s and ‘40s, where therapeutic doses could cause mild memory loss. Of course, the dose the Winter Soldier got was orders of magnitude greater than that, causing severe retrograde amnesia.
“Creating the perfect blank slate upon which to construct new behavioral paradigms and protocols,” she put it.
After The Vise, Bucky had to hear The Words, over, and over, and over, and over again. Natasha coached Clint over the phone to say The Words perfectly, having been selected for the task based on his vague, white guy resemblance to Karpov. Throughout the whole process, Beardo documented everything in a log, including any deviations from the priming sequence, behavioral observations, and duration of each component of each trial. Just like Hydra.
Steve was always blessedly absent from these trials. Doctor’s orders. Bucky was beyond relieved, even though the look on Steve’s face when he found out made the pit of Bucky’s stomach clench. Steve had been an explicitly identified target for termination at numerous points, and they had to eliminate all potential confounds that could disrupt the extinction process. Same with Sam. That left Clint, Wanda, Scott, T’Challa, and Beardo to run the protocols. Bucky refused to have Wanda there, so it was just the four men posing as his programmers and handlers.
Each trial was a gut-wrenching test of will. Bucky would tremble, wide-eyed, terrified, choking down the contents of his stomach, trying desperately to hold himself together in front of Steve’s friends. Worse was knowing that he could walk away any time, that he was subjecting himself to this of his own volition based on some psychological theory that Beardo was sure would help him.
Scott pulled Bucky aside after one of the early trials and told him that he thought he was really brave but that he shouldn’t feel obligated to continue. He almost gave Bucky a friendly clap on the shoulder but stopped himself. Scott clearly didn’t have the ability to pretend to be unaffected by a man suffering in extremis, which Bucky respected, though it didn’t help him much. Bucky would sometimes look at T’Challa’s face when he felt like bolting, which was like a warm and stern reminder that he had to soldier the fuck up if this whole shit show had even a small chance of working.
The first 34 times going through the priming protocol, Bucky primed successfully. But when no mission was given, when no report was requested, when no reinforcement was offered, when no conditions of compliance or noncompliance were given, he just sat. Breathing, sweating, waiting. And they would let him sit until he noticed the first indication that autonomous functioning had resumed.
At first, it was hard to tell when the priming wore off. The first few times, he sat there for hours on end as the attending Avengers exchanged unsure looks. Beardo reassured them in his soothing psychologist voice that this was all perfectly normal. As the trials went on, Bucky began to notice a subtle change when the priming faded. Usually his first cue was a thought – any thought. One time it was “I wish I could itch my leg.” Another time it was “I wonder if I need a root canal.”
Every time the priming wore off, he was supposed to say a code word or phrase so that they knew without a doubt that he was lucid. There was a short debate among the Avengers about what the code should be. The first suggestions were typically adolescent:
“Excelsior!”
“Heeeeeere’s Johnny!”
“Who farted?”
Steve shut down the crap pretty fast and suggested “O’Shaughnessy’s Market,” because he and Bucky used to pool their pennies together to buy saltwater taffy there when they didn’t have enough dough to make a day of Coney Island. Bucky felt a ghost of a smile on his face, remembering the market and the times they went there. Inside him, a dim light started to glow. But as soon as it fully registered, it snuffed out, and that flicker of warmth never quite reached his eyes.
The 35th trial, nothing happened. As soon as they said The Words, Bucky said “Well, that didn’t work,” then quickly corrected himself to “O’Shaughnessy’s Market.” The team exchanged some whoops and smiles. Bucky just sat with the sobering shock that this whole insane process had actually succeeded
After trial 35, Bucky primed intermittently over the next 8 trials until he hit a streak of 15 non-responses, which Beardo deemed to be sufficient proof that extinction had occurred. He recommended that they do a trial once a week for the next three months to ensure that there was no spontaneous recovery, which they all agreed to.
The Book was one of the hardest parts for Bucky, for reasons he didn’t understand. The image of it in his head still brings a small wave of dread and nausea. When he saw it for the first time after coming out of cryo, he had a full-blown panic attack. So in addition to having Clint pretend to read from it during each priming trial, Beardo made him walk around with the goddamn thing 24/7 for three weeks straight. Even to the shitter.
“Habituation,” Beardo called it. “After a while, you won’t associate the book with the threat of harm. It will just be a red book with a star on it that used to mean something really bad.”
Fuck. You, Bucky thought.
But, yeah, seeing it doesn’t scare the bejesus out of him anymore. Doesn’t cause him to break out in a cold sweat or lose his lunch. That agonizing slog through 6 weeks of book-toting, chair-sitting, and word-repeating had actually worked. And yet…
And yet.
Suddenly, the doorknob rattles. Bucky tenses as the door directly in front of him slowly swings open. He looks up at the face – the beard – of the man who is expecting him, and he instantly regrets not chicken-shitting out of this.
“Oh, good! You stayed today. I was wondering if I was ever going to see you sitting in that chair when I opened the door.”
“Is it too late to back out?” Bucky asks.
“Nope. You can leave right now, if you want. There’s the exit.” Beardo points down the hallway toward the door that leads to Steve and everyone else.
Bucky clenches his jaw and stares down that hallway. He imagines the look on Steve’s face, on Sam’s dumb face, and all the rest of their faces if he were to walk back through that door, having obviously not even tried.
“I’m not in a talking mood.”
“No problem. You wanna come in and stare at the wall for an hour so your friends think you’re actually getting help, that’s your choice.”
“They’re not my friends. Just Steve is.”
“Sure.” Beardo smiles. “Steve and his friends.”
The stubborn Irish in him wins out and he stands. “Okay, then,” he says with a sigh. “Lead the way, Doc.”